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Self-driving car dilemmas reveal that moral choices are not universal

Survey maps global variations in ethics for programming autonomous vehicles.
  1. Amy Maxmen
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When a driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road illegally, she is making a moral decision that shifts risk from the pedestrian to the people in the car. Self-driving cars might soon have to make such ethical judgments on their own — but settling on a universal moral code for the vehicles could be a thorny task, suggests a survey of 2.3 million people from around the world.

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Nature 562, 469-470 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07135-0

References

  1. Awad, E. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6 (2018).

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  2. Bonnefon, J. et al. Science 352, 1573-1576 (2016).

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