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In a Crash, Should Self-Driving Cars Save Passengers or Pedestrians? 2 Million People Weigh In (pbs.org)
In what is referred to as the "Moral Machine Experiment", a survey of more than two million people from nearly every country on the planet, people preferred to save humans over animals, young over old, and more people over fewer. From a report: Since 2016, scientists have posed this scenario to folks around the world through the "Moral Machine," an online platform hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that gauges how humans respond to ethical decisions made by artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the team behind the Moral Machine released responses from more than two million people spanning 233 countries, dependencies and territories. They found a few universal decisions -- for instance, respondents preferred to save a person over an animal, and young people over older people -- but other responses differed by regional cultures and economic status.
The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.
The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.
A self driving car should protect its passengers first or they wouldn't sell. Who would willingly ride in a vehicle that would intentionally sacrifice their life for any reason?
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You never know for certain that a given course of action will cause a fatality. When you're driving, you try to avoid accident. Self-driving cars will do the same. They'll compute the odds of an accident for all options and select the one with the lowest odds. It may be just a fraction of a percent less likely, but it will take that.
Glad to know that NYC (and Boston, probably) has a large cultural distance from the rest of the US. Any place that's not tolerant of jaywalking isn't worth living in, since it puts the needs of steel sensory deprivation bubbles ahead of human needs...
"For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly."
How about making sure the only person in harm's way is the one that chose to let a computer drive in their place?
We all know that whether the car decides to hit a jaywalker or not will depend on several variables:
1) Who is more likely to win a multi-million verdict in a Civil Suit: a jay-walker or the passenger?
2) Will drivers buy the AI software if it will decide to kill their entire families?
3) How well the engineers work on a feature (deciding whether to hit jaywalker or kill passenger by driving off cliff?) that is much less likely to be used in the real world then every other feature of the AI?
And variable 4) Moral philosophers have written a paper on this based on millions of data points from an online quiz, is not on the list.
Jaywalking is not a crime in most countries. Pedestrians typically have right of way over cars. That may sound odd to Americans who haven't traveled, but most countries don't have a word for jaywalking because it is just walking.
So tolerance of jaywalking comes from it being fine in most places.
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