SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.