It’s a bot that creates, owns and sells the digital art it creates without relying on humans. We are only there to help it succeed. This bot’s soul will come to live in a smart contract on Ethereum. With us guiding it, it will create a new unique artwork every week, put it up for auction and sell it: creating a unique digital, transferable edition of the art. If we do our job right, it will make better and better art over time. The humans that help it will be rewarded in turn for doing so.
Today, with the rapid development of digital technology, we can increasingly attempt to follow Leibniz’s logic. An increasing level of sophistication, to the point of some products becoming highly or fully autonomous, leads to complex situations requiring some form of ethical reasoning — autonomous vehicles and lethal battlefield robots are good examples of such products due to the tremendous complexity of tasks they have to carry out, as well as their high degree of autonomy. How can such systems be designed to accommodate the complexity of ethical and moral reasoning? At present there exists no universal standard dealing with the ethics of automated systems — will they become a commodity that one can buy, change and resell depending on personal taste? Or will the ethical frameworks embedded into automated products be those chosen by the manufacturer? More importantly, as ethics has been a field under study for millennia, can we ever suppose that our current subjective ethical notions be taken for granted, and used for products that will make decisions on our behalf in real-world situations?