A SELF-DRIVING car is travelling along a two-lane road when its brakes fail. Should it stay in lane and hit a pregnant woman, a doctor and a criminal on a pedestrian crossing, or swerve and hit a barrier, killing the family of four in the vehicle?
This derivative of the classic Trolley Problem is the kind of scenario that makes up the , an ethics survey of millions of people from 233 countries and territories around the world. Participants were asked to consider different scenarios in which those who might be saved could be, say, fit or fat, young or old, pets, criminals or those with high-status jobs. In all, 40 million decisions were collected.
Overall, people preferred to spare humans over animals and younger over older people, and tried to save the most lives. The characters that people opted to save least were dogs, followed by criminals and then cats (Nature, ).
Advertisement
Edmond Awad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues think these findings can inform policy-makers and the experts they may rely on as they devise regulations for driverless cars. 鈥淭his is one way to deliver what the public wants,鈥� he says.
The team found that people in regional clusters made similar decisions. In an Eastern cluster, which included Islamic countries and eastern Asian nations that belong to the Confucianist cultural group, there was less of a preference to spare the young over the old, or to spare those with high status. Decisions to save humans ahead of cats and dogs were less pronounced in a Southern cluster, which included Central and South America, and countries with French influence. The preference there was to spare women and fit people.
Many technology researchers and ethicists told 麻豆传媒 they thought the results shouldn鈥檛 be used to set policy or design autonomous vehicles because that would simply perpetuate cultural biases that may not reflect moral decisions.
鈥淭he fact that there are some cultural patterns should not surprise us, but that has nothing to do with the fact that something is right or wrong,鈥� says ethicist H.Peter Steeves at DePaul University in Chicago. The instinct to save women and children, for example, is rooted in patriarchal views of these groups having less autonomy and therefore being deserving of rescue, he says.
We end up having these debates because we anthropomorphise AI, but ethics related to transport isn鈥檛 just about self-driving cars, says Joanna Bryson at the University of Bath, UK. We already make decisions and trade-offs about road use that don鈥檛 always result in the highest safety for the greatest number of people. 鈥淪UVs are twice as likely to kill anybody you hit, and yet we鈥檝e accepted that into our culture,鈥� she says.
Programming morality into an algorithm may be impossible, especially if coders and the general public don鈥檛 act ethically on the whole, says Steeves. 鈥淭hen the dream of finding the right moral algorithm is just as absurd as finding the right comedic parabola, or the right colour of dance, or the right frequency for spaghetti.鈥�
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淚n a crash, whose life would you spare?鈥�
