Responsible Autonomy

The main challenge that artificial intelligence research is facing nowadays is how to guarantee the development of responsible technology. And, in particular, how to guarantee that autonomy is responsible. The social fears on the actions taken by AI can only be appeased by providing ethical certification and transparency of systems.\footnote{See for instance the Barcelona declaration \url{https://www.iiia.csic.es/barcelonadeclaration/}} However, this is certainly not an easy task. As we very well know in the multiagent systems field, the prediction accuracy of system outcomes has limits as multiagent systems are actually examples of complex systems. And AI will be social, there will be thousands of AI systems interacting among themselves and with a multitude of humans; AI will necessarily be multiagent. Although we cannot provide complete guarantees on outcomes, we must be able to define with accuracy what autonomous behaviour is acceptable (ethical), to provide repair methods for anomalous behaviour and to explain the rationale of AI decisions. Ideally, we should be able to guarantee responsible behaviour of individual AI systems \emph{by construction}. I understand by an ethical AI system one that is capable of deciding what are the most convenient norms, abide by them and make them evolve and adapt. The area of multiagent systems has developed a number of theoretical and practical tools that properly combined can provide a path to develop such systems, that is, provide means to build ethical-by-construction systems: agreement technologies to decide on acceptable ethical behaviour, normative frameworks to represent and reason on ethics, and electronic institutions to operationalise ethical interactions. Along my career, I have contributed with tools on these three areas \cite{DBLP:journals/ki/SierraBO11,DBLP:journals/aamas/PinninckSS10,DBLP:journals/ai/dInvernoLNRS12}. In this keynote, I will describe a methodology to support their combination that incorporates some new ideas from law \cite{hohfeld}, and organisational theory \cite{ostrom}