Ethical Operating Systems

Abstract

A well-ingrained and recommended engineering practice in safety-critical software systems is to separate safety concerns from other aspects of the system. Along these lines, there have been calls for operating systems (or computing substrates, termed ethical operating systems) that implement ethical controls in an ethical layer separate from, and not amenable to tampering by, developers and modules in higher-level intelligence or cognition layers. There have been no implementations that demonstrate such a marshalling of ethical principles into an ethical layer. To address this, we present three different tracks for implementing such systems, and offer a prototype implementation of the third track. We end by addressing objections to our approach.