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Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles

Nature volume 579, pages E3–E5 (2020)Cite this article

The Original Article was published on 04 March 2020

Replying to: Y. E. Bigman & K. Gray. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1987-4 (2020)

In ‘The Moral Machine experiment’ (MME)1, we argued that policymakers would benefit from being aware of citizens’ preferences regarding the behaviour of autonomous vehicles in critical situations—situations in which an autonomous vehicle cannot save everyone, but can still decide to save one group of road users or another. In the accompanying Comment2, Bigman and Gray make the important point that the way we measure these preferences can affect the results we obtain.

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Fig. 1: Distribution of explicit preferences stated by Moral Machine users.
Fig. 2: Preferences extracted from the conjoint analysis of the Moral Machine dataset.

Data availability

Data and code that can be used to reproduce Figs. 1 and 2 are available at https://bit.ly/2VKyMhJ.

References

  1. Awad, E. et al. The Moral Machine experiment. Nature 563, 59–64 (2018).

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  2. Bigman, Y. E. & Gray, K. Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1987-4 (2020).

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  3. Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D. J. & Yamamoto, T. Causal inference in conjoint analysis: understanding multidimensional choices via stated preference experiments. Political Anal. 22, 1–30 (2014).

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Acknowledgements

J.-F.B. acknowledges support from the ANR-Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, the ANR-3IA Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute, and the grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 Investissements d’Avenir. I.R. acknowledges funding from the Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim & Iyad Rahwan

  2. Department of Economics, University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK

    Edmond Awad

  3. Department of Economics, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Jonathan Schulz

  4. Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joseph Henrich

  5. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Azim Shariff

  6. Toulouse School of Economics (TSM-R), , CNRS, Université Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France

    Jean-François Bonnefon

  7. Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Iyad Rahwan

  8. Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

    Iyad Rahwan

Authors
  1. Edmond Awad
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  2. Sohan Dsouza
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  3. Richard Kim
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  4. Jonathan Schulz
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  5. Joseph Henrich
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  6. Azim Shariff
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  7. Jean-François Bonnefon
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  8. Iyad Rahwan
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Contributions

I.R., A.S. and J.-F.B. planned the research. I.R., A.S., J.-F.B., E.A. and S.D. designed the experiment. E.A. and S.D. built the platform and collected the data. E.A., S.D., R.K., J.S. and A.S. analysed the data. E.A., S.D., R.K., J.S., J.H., A.S., J.-F.B. and I.R interpreted the results and wrote the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon or Iyad Rahwan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R. et al. Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles. Nature 579, E3–E5 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1988-3

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