In a Crash, Should Self-Driving Cars Save Passengers or Pedestrians? 2 Million People Weigh In

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.

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