(Newswire.net — October 29, 2015) — Imagine this scenario: You are the proud owner of an autonomous vehicle, which drives you on a road that will kill you if it unexpectedly turns left or right, whether it is a cliff or a concrete wall on the side of that road. Suddenly, around the corner, a group of people appears and even braking couldn’t stop the car before it hits them.
Would AV’s artificial intelligence calculate that it is better to sacrifice driver in order to save as many people as possible?
This moral and ethical dilemma has been discussed in a new paper published in Arxiv, the IFL Science reported.
“It is a formidable challenge to define the algorithms that will guide AVs [Autonomous Vehicles] confronted with such moral dilemmas,” French researchers led by Jean-Francois Bonnefon from the Toulouse School of Economics, wrote.
The researchers note that some accidents like the above-mentioned scenario are inevitable, implying that this dilemma has to be resolved by experts and incorporated in an AV’s software.
“We argue to achieve these objectives, manufacturers and regulators will need psychologists to apply the methods of experimental ethics to situations involving AVs and unavoidable harm.”
Researchers conducted a survey of several hundred people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing tool. They surveyed people with this dilemma and got the expected results: the majority said that the needs of the group are greater than the needs of an individual, however, not if they are the individual who needed to be sacrificed in order to save the group.
As the survey presented other data, such as the number of people in cockpit, their age, whether there are children on board, age and sex of people on the road, it showed that 75% of respondents thought it would be moral to swerve, but only 65% thought the cars should actually be programmed to swerve, when imagining themselves in cockpit.
“On a scale from -50 (protect the driver at all costs) to +50 (maximize the number of lives saved), the average response was +24,” the researchers wrote. “Results suggest that participants were generally comfortable with utilitarian AVs, programmed to minimize an accident’s death toll.”
According to scientists, self-driving cars are safer on the road than cars driven by motorists with all their imperfections and self-preserving tendencies, and there is little doubt that self-driving cars are not the future for public transportation.