Chapter 25: Challenges and Extensions

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• Chapter 25Challenges and Extensions

Service-Oriented Computing Semantics, Processes,
Agents Munindar P. Singh and Michael N. Huhns,
Wiley, 2005
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Highlights of this Chapter

• Trust
• Ethics
• Coherence
• Benevolence
• Managing Privacy
• Key Challenges and Recommendations

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Systemic Trust

• Fundamentally
• The information agents retrieve must be accurate,
  or characterized accurately
• The information agents contribute must be used
  appropriately
• Requires
• Sources have reliability and reputation, and
  specify constraints on usage
• Dependencies are preserved and maintained
• Results information items have credibility and
  domains of utility agents self-organize into
  service communities

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Trust

• Trust means that services
• Are understood in context
• Have the right capabilities and understanding of
  needs
• Follow legal contracts where specified
• Support ones organization or society
• Follow an understood ethics
• Failing all else, behave rationally

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Ethical Abstractions

• Agents that are members of a society must have an
  ethics and a philosophy. This requires the
  development of components for
• Deontological ethics
• Teleological ethics
• Consequentialism
• Duties
• Obligations
• Applying ethics

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Motivation

• The ethical abstractions help us specify agents
  who would act appropriately
• Intuitively, ethics is just the basic way of
  distinguishing right from wrong
• It is difficult to separate ethics entirely from
  legal, social, or even economic considerations

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Right and Good

• Right that which is right in itself
• Good that which is good or valuable for someone
  or for some end

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Deontological vs. Teleological

• Deontological theories
• Right before good
• Being good does not mean being right
• Ends do not justify means
• Teleological theories
• Good before right
• Something is right only if it maximizes the good
• Ends justify means

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Deontological Theories

• Constraints
• Negatively formulated
• Narrowly framed
• E.g., lying is not not-telling-the-truth
• Narrowly directed at the agents specific action
• Not its occurrence by other means
• Not the consequences that are not explicitly
  chosen, i.e., only applies on consequences that
  are explicitly identified

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Double Effect

• Deontological theories distinguish intentional
  effects from foreseen consequences
• An action is not wrong unless the agent
  explicitly intends for it to do wrong
• Legitimizes inaction even when inaction has
  predictable (but unintended) effects
• Shut down bank ATM for diagnostics even if that
  might leave someone without cash

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Kants Categorical Imperative

• Whatever maxim an agent uses must be
  universalizable, i.e., in the society of agents
• Respect for others (no lying or coercion) so they
  can consent
• False promising is unacceptable, because if
  everyone did so, society would not function
• Agents maxims are uncertainly inferred from
  their actions

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Teleological Theories

• Based on how actions satisfy various goals, not
  their intrinsic rightness
• Comparison-based
• Preference-based

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Consequentialism

• An agent should promote whatever values it adopts
• Actions are instrumental in the promotion
• Honor the values only if doing so promotes them

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Utilitarianism

• This is the view that a moral action is one that
  is useful
• Must be good for someone
• Good may be interpreted as
• Pleasure hedonism
• Preference satisfaction microeconomic
  rationalism (assumes each agent knows its
  preferences)
• Interest satisfaction welfare utilitarianism
• Aesthetic ideals ideal utilitarianism

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Prima Facie Duties

• What agents need to decide actions are
• Not just universal principles (each can be
  stretched)
• Not just consequences
• But also a regard for their promises and duties
• Agents have prima facie duties to help others,
  keep promises, repay kindness,...
• No ranking among these
• Highly defeasible conclusions, e.g., steal to
  feed kids

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Obligations

• Obligations are
• For deontological theories, those that are
  impermissible to omit
• For teleological theories, those that most
  promote good
• For contract-based theories, those that an agent
  accepts

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Asimovs Laws of Robotics

• 0. A robot may not injure humanity or, through
  inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Added
  after the following more famous laws
• 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or,
  through inaction, allow a human being to come to
  harm.
• 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human
  beings except where such orders would conflict
  with the First Law.
• 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long
  as such protection does not conflict with the
  First or Second Law.

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Applying Ethics 1

• The ethical theories are theories
• Of justification
• Not of deliberation
• An agent can decide what basic value system to
  use under any approach

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Applying Ethics 2

• The deontological theories (right)
• Are narrower
• Ignore practical consideration
• But are only meant as incomplete constraints (out
  of all the right actions, the agent can choose
  any)
• The teleological theories (good)
• Are broader
• Include practical considerations
• But leave fewer options for the agent, who must
  always choose the best available alternative

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Applying Ethics 3

• The ethical approaches
• Are single-agent in orientation
• Implicitly encode other agents
• An explicitly multiagent ethics would be an
  interesting topic for study

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An Agent Should Act

• Benevolently
• Seeking the welfare of others
• Rationally, i.e., maximizing utility
• Consistent with its model of itself (including
  its desires and capabilities)
• Predictably
• Consistent with its model of other agents
  beliefs about itself

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Benevolence A Mattress in the Road
Who will stop to pick it up?
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Information System ExampleA Collective Store

• Benevolent agents might contribute information
  they have retrieved, filtered, and refined to a
  collective store
• Utilitarian variant Access to the collective
  store is predicated on contributions to it

Collective Store
World Wide Web...
Query Agents
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Challenges and Recommendations

• Respect autonomy and heterogeneity
• Design rules for various levels ontologies,
  transactions, protocols, organizations,
• Security and trust difficult given openness
• Scalability
• Quality of service understood to include user
  needs and application specifics
• User-centered requirements analysis and design to
  capture key functionality in a manner that works
  in multiple settings

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To Probe Further

• IEEE Internet Computing, http//computer.org/inter
  net
• DAI-List-Request_at_engr.sc.edu
• (International Joint Conference and Journal)
  Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
• Journal of Web Semantics
• Intl. Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)
• Intl. Conf. on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC)
• Intl. Conf. on Web Services (ICWS)
• World-Wide Web Conference

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Chapter 25 Summary

• SOC improves our effectiveness in building
  large-scale systems in open environments
• Because of openness, SOC systems rely upon trust
  among components and in dealing with people
• SOC technologies support aspects of trust
  progressing, but not solved
• Concepts from human ethics can inspire
  abstractions for designing SOC systems
• Ethics can help make SOC systems manageable and
  responsive to human needs