“Should robots have rights or rites?” Communications of the ACM (With Alan Strudler).
“Taking Principles Seriously: A Hybrid Approach to Value Alignment in Artificial Intelligence,” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (accepted).
“Why a right to an explanation of algorithmic decision-making should exist: A trust-based approach” (with Bryan R. Routledge), Business Ethics Quarterly (accepted).
“Are data subjects investors?” (with Jooho Lee, Joseph Xu, and Bryan Routledge), Berkeley Business Law Journal (accepted).
“From Artificial intelligence to artificial wisdom” (with Santiago Mejia), IEEE Computer.
“The ethics of contentious hard forks in blockchain networks with fixed features,” (with Ariel Zetlin-Jones). Frontiers in Blockchain. An advantage of blockchain protocols is that a decentralized community of users may each update and maintain a public ledger without the need for a trusted third party. Such modifications introduce important economic and ethical considerations that we believe have not been considered among the community of blockchain developers. We clarify the problem and provide one implementable ethical framework that such developers could use to determine which aspects should be immutable and which should not.
"Truly autonomous vehicles are ethical" (Collaborating with John Hooker). (forthcoming in AI Magazine) Researchers, companies, and governmental bodies are racing to developing more autonomous machines such as self-driving vehicles, robot caregivers and autonomous weapons. But majorities of Americans are worried about emerging autonomous technologies (Smith and Anderson 2017). The concern is, perhaps, groundless, given that using autonomous vehicles, for instance, will decrease the total amount of accidents. Yet, the public reaction is not entirely unreasonable. The dominant notion of autonomous agent (e.g., Franklin and Graesser 1996), is the very reason for the concern, we argue. According to the definition, autonomous machines are agents that can make a decision independently of exogenous forces (e.g., human intervention). It follows, as a logical matter, that autonomous machines can make a decision inconsistently with humans’ interests. The dominant model, once fully realized, would be dangerous. It would be so because the model is indifferent to rationality, we explain. We offer a rationality-responsive notion of autonomous agents, by which single autonomous agent systems are simultaneously understood as multiagents systems.
Tae Wan Kim & Alan Scheller-Wolf. "Technological unemployment, meaning in life, purpose of business, and the future of stakeholders" : Slides). The dynamic nature of capitalism creates new jobs through technological innovation, but there is growing concern that advanced machines will master skills for newly created jobs faster than humans. Given societal concerns about the future, and given that work often confers much of life’s meaning for people, my coauthor and I explore questions about automation, meaning in life, and the purpose of future business (*This working paper recently helped consultants in KPMG write a report about automation and et
Tae Wan Kim & John Hooker, “Ethical implications of the second machine age on business and society.” (Draft. To be published as a book chapter of Business&Society 360).
"Toward non-intuition-based machine and artificial intelligence (AI) ethics: A deontological approach based on modal logic" (Accepted to AAAI/ACM Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society) . For this paper, I am coauthoring with John Hooker. We propose a deontological approach to machine ethics that avoids some weaknesses of an intuition-based system. In particular, it has no need to deal with conflicting intuitions, and it yields a more satisfactory account of when autonomy should be respected. We begin with a “dual standpoint” theory of action that regards actions as grounded in reasons and therefore as having a conditional form that is suited to machine instructions. We then derive ethical principles based on formal properties that the reasons must exhibit to be coherent, and formulate the principles using quantified modal logic. We conclude that deontology not only provides a more satisfactory basis for machine ethics but endows the machine with an ability to explain its actions, thus contributing to transparency in AI.
Gastón de los Reyes, Tae Wan Kim, & Gary Weaver. (Online First). “Teaching ethics in business schools: A conversation on disciplinary differences, academic provincialism, and the case for integrated pedagogy,” Academy of Management Learning & Education.
Tae Wan Kim. (Online First). “Gamification of labor and the charge of exploitation,” Journal of Business Ethics.
Tae Wan Kim (first author) & Thomas Donaldson. (Online First). “Rethinking right: Moral epistemology in management research,” Journal of Business Ethics (*This article will be reprinted as a book chapter of Cambridge Handbook of Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility, P. Werhane, E. Freeman, and S. Dmytriyev (Eds.), Forthcoming, Cambridge University Press.)
Jessica Kennedy, Tae Wan Kim, & Alan Strudler. (2016). “Hierarchies and dignity: A Confucian communitarian approach,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 26(4): 479-502. (*This article was identified by the editorial award panel of the Business Ethics Quarterly as the “Best Article of 2016.”)
Tae Wan Kim & Kevin Werbach. (2016). “More than just a game: Ethical issues in gamification,” Ethics and Information Technology, 18(2): 157-173. (My co-author Kevin Werbach was featured in a recent NYT article to speak about abusive uses of gamification. See "How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers' Buttons.")
Tae Wan Kim, Rosemarie Monge & Alan Strudler. (2015). “Bounded ethicality and the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 25(3): 341-369.
Tae Wan Kim. (2014). “Confucian ethics and labor rights,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 24 (4): 565-594.
Tae Wan Kim. (2014). “Decent termination: A moral case for severance pay,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 24(2): 203-227. (*This article was identified by the editorial award panel of the Business Ethics Quarterly as the “Best Article of 2014.”)
Tae Wan Kim (first author) & Alan Strudler. (2012). “Workplace civility: A Confucian approach,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 22(3): 557-577.
Katherina Glac & Tae Wan Kim. (2009). “The ‘I’ in ISCT: Normative and empirical facets of integration,” Journal of Business Ethics, 88(4): 693-705.
Vikram Bhargava & Tae Wan Kim. (Forthcoming). “Autonomous vehicles and moral uncertainty,” In P. Lin, K. Abney, and R. Jenkins (Eds.), Robot Ethics 2.0, Oxford University Press.
Tae Wan Kim. (2016). “Alejo Sison’s Happiness and Virtue Ethics in Business,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 26(2): 261-264.
