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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: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:43PM (7 children)
Depending on the location, the local norms can be different.
What if a self-driving car travels far enough to go from an area where the norm is "Kill the Baby" to another area where the norm is to "Kill Grandma"?
Does the car get reprogrammed?
At what point/time?
Imagine importing a car from, say, Japan to the US (or vice versa). Could be a move up the ladder in come mega-corp. Could be a career change. Could be learning of a great opportunity from a college buddy or an online posting, etc.
What about a sight-seeing trip across all of Europe and into Asia?
Who decides? When? Where? How?
How clearly are these local norms codified (which makes this somewhat easier)? Or... is this one of those "everyone just knows" you should save the baby/grandma?
I predict a whole lot of new case law ahead.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 5, Funny) by looorg on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:27PM
Probably GPS (or similar). So those old signs that said "Welcome to $city_name" will now instead inform you of whom the AI decides to kill ... "Welcome to New York, death to Grandma!"
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:46PM (1 child)
In many places a service would remove "green idea" devices from cars and reprogram to avoid annoying warnings. It's done to increase power and mileage.
I am sure an AI that has to decide whom to kill - passengers or pedestrians - would be hacked the very first day.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:30PM
In Florida it'd aim for the woman in the BLM shirt. In San Francisco it'd aim for the guy in the "Salad is what food eats" shirt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:58PM (1 child)
Moral relativism creeping in by the backdoor. STOP! The one true answer is that we kill grandma. Any other answer is a denial of my religious freedom.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 29 2021, @03:51PM
I thought it was a denial of your reproductive freedom.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 29 2021, @06:03PM (1 child)
Imagine importing a car from, say, Japan to the US (or vice versa). Could be a move up the ladder in come mega-corp. Could be a career change.
That's very simple: you don't! You can't do it now, so what makes you think it should be possible with self-driving cars? Japan drives on the left, not the right, and while you technically *can* import a US can there, it's very difficult and costly, and only rich people do it to show off, so it's very rare. Normal people are just going to sell their US car in the US, move to the foreign country, and buy a car there. There's many things on cars that frequently do not meet other countries' safety standards, such as taillights (in the US, they can all be red, in other countries, the turn signals have to be amber), bumper height (US requires higher bumpers than European cars), etc.
Also, getting a license to drive in Japan is very difficult and very costly (thousands of US dollars). And you won't pass if you can't read Japanese road signs. But if you're taking a new job at some mega-corp in Japan, you don't need to drive anyway: you just take the train and walk to work, since all the mega-corps' offices are in big cities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @08:19PM
You insensitive clod! I live in Brexit!