Moral responsibility for computationally designed products

Abstract

Computational design systems (such as those using evolutionary algorithms) can create designs for a variety of physical products. Introducing these systems into the design process risks creating a ‘responsibility gap’ for flaws in the products they are used to create, as human designers may no longer believe that they are wholly responsible for them. We respond to this problem by distinguishing between causal responsibility and capacity responsibility (the ability to be morally responsible for actions) for creating product designs to argue that while the computational design systems and human designers are both casually responsible for creating product designs, the human designers who use these systems and the developers who create them have capacity responsibility for such designs. We show that there is no responsibility gap for products designed using computational design systems by comparing different accounts of moral responsibility for robots and AI (instrumentalism, machine ethics, and hybrid responsibility). We argue that all three of these accounts of moral responsibility for AI systems support the conclusion that the product designers who use computational design systems and the developers of these systems are morally responsible for any flaws or faults in the products designed by these systems. We conclude by showing how the responsibilities of accountability and blameworthiness should be attributed between the product designers, the developers of the computational design systems.