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Should a self-driving car kill the baby or the grandma? Depends on where you're from.:
In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game-like platform that would crowdsource people's decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in different variations of the "trolley problem." In the process, the data generated would provide insight into the collective ethical priorities of different cultures.
The researchers never predicted the experiment's viral reception. Four years after the platform went live, millions of people in 233 countries and territories have logged 40 million decisions, making it one of the largest studies ever done on global moral preferences.
A new paper published in Nature presents the analysis of that data and reveals how much cross-cultural ethics diverge on the basis of culture, economics, and geographic location.
[...] Awad hopes the results will also help technologists think more deeply about the ethics of AI beyond self-driving cars. "We used the trolley problem because it's a very good way to collect this data, but we hope the discussion of ethics don't stay within that theme," he said. "The discussion should move to risk analysis—about who is at more risk or less risk—instead of saying who's going to die or not, and also about how bias is happening." How these results could translate into the more ethical design and regulation of AI is something he hopes to study more in the future.
"In the last two, three years more people have started talking about the ethics of AI," Awad said. "More people have started becoming aware that AI could have different ethical consequences on different groups of people. The fact that we see people engaged with this—I think that that's something promising."
Journal Reference:
Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, et al. The Moral Machine experiment, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 28 2021, @12:30PM (17 children)
Self-driving AI should always kill the passenger(s) if the choice is between them and someone outside the car. They're the ones who chose to abdicate the responsibility of making sure the ton or so of steel they use to get around town doesn't kill people, so they should be the ones to suffer the consequences.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:41PM (1 child)
> making sure the ton or so of steel
Man, your car must be really rusted out! It's been quite a few years since cars weighed a ton (2000 US pounds (~900kg). There might be a few left on the US market, maybe a Lotus? The small Mitsubishi Mirage (that I'm sure you wouldn't be caught dead using) is ~2100 pounds. Just about everything else is well over 3000#, pushing on two tons.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 29 2021, @03:43PM
Look up the phrase "or so".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:33PM (2 children)
I wonder what "free market" would think about it.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:37PM
If the cars self-destruct wouldn't they sell more cars ... less people to buy them tho but the more car deaths there are in the beginning the less idiot drivers so eventually your will reach car-morality-death-equilibrium and all will be fine?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:56PM
Externalization. Market loves it, we have a winner.
*I* want to go 100mph therefore *you* take the risk of being hit by a vehicle moving at 100mph.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:12PM (2 children)
> Self-driving AI should always kill the passenger(s) if the choice is between them and someone outside the car.
Mercedes announced that their self driving cars would always do the opposite, and will mow down all 10 schoolchildren crossing the road rather than risk injury to the driver by swerving into a ditch.
Rich selfish assholes already would drive through the crowd of schoolchildren rather than risk injury to themselves-- Mercedes just knows their target market. I expect BMW and other brands targeting these selfish pricks to follow suit.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064539/self-driving-mercedes-will-be-programmed-to-sacrifice-pedestrians-to-save-the-driver [fastcompany.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @05:56PM (1 child)
Right. I am SURE you would want the AI that would choose to kill you or your wife or your kid, whoever was the driver. Big demand for a car that prioritizes your life and body below everyone else's.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 29 2021, @03:48PM
That's absolutely what I want sold. Not that I'd ever push my responsibility in a life and death situation off on a machine. Or for that matter even another person whose driving I don't trust.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday January 28 2021, @05:20PM
Yeah, they knew what they were getting into [youtube.com]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 28 2021, @05:37PM (3 children)
That sounds all fine and well, the problem is that in reality, it almost never comes down to that kind of choice. People inside the car are far more protected than people outside the car, for obvious reasons, and the car presumably already has a large amount of momentum and inertia, so it can't suddenly self-destruct or take a magical 90-degree turn to avoid hurting anyone.\
Also in reality, abdicating the responsibility to a computer is going to increase safety many-fold. Humans suck at operating high-speed vehicles: they have poor reaction times, they can't hold their attention for long, they have poor sensory abilities (such as not being able to see in many directions simultaneously), and many of them are just plain stupid. Not everyone can be Mario Andretti.
The better solution to all of this would be to eliminate privately-owned cars, and only have professionally-driven vehicles (mainly taxis), to be replaced with automated ones later, and for the bulk of human trips to be done by train as it is in better-designed cities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @06:13PM (1 child)
> the bulk of human trips to be done by train
Sorry, nearly all the train tracks around here have already been turned into bike/walking paths, and various other things built on the right-of-way. You are talking about vast areas of the USA that will not be within distance of a train track, much less a train station.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 29 2021, @05:56PM
Right, obviously you can't feasibly connect tons of small towns and suburbs with trains and have people get around efficiently. Trains work when the population is urbanized: most people living in denser cities where there's no parking spaces wasting all the space, and it's walkable, with trains (subways or light rail) to get from neighborhood to neighborhood, and then high-speed trains to get from city to city. You can see this in Manhattan, but Tokyo is a much better example of how this can work well. Germany does it pretty well too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 29 2021, @03:49PM
Greater safety will be cold comfort to the people whose loved ones are now bloody chunks of meat and the only thing they can do about it is say "oh well" and get on with their day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday January 28 2021, @06:21PM (3 children)
How about self driving cars have a setting?
In the event of an accident:
[_] prioritize occupant safety
[_] prioritize pedestrian safety
[x] minimize collision damage costs for this and other vehicles
[_] minimize difficulty of writing police report
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 28 2021, @07:49PM (2 children)
I see, you want to give lawyers more opportunities for lawsuits. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Friday January 29 2021, @04:32AM
Ok make it such that a lawyer decides on it every time a new AI car is purchased. Pass a law for it, also while we're at it, the lawyer can be paid in a fraction of the time from their $xxx/hr rate where they make this decision and a cap of say 5 minutes. They can then sue each other to oblivion for all I care. Time to make lawyers more accountable I say and feed them their own dog food.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 29 2021, @04:08PM
Imagine cheaper, faster and more rational "virtual lawyers". Especially court appointed "virtual public defenders". (movie: The Sixth Day)
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious