22 - To veer, or not to veer

Podcast 2030

We're happy to bring you an interview with researcher Edmond Awad, who worked on creating Moral Machine, an online platform which presents users with moral dilemmas. Users are required to make decisions about how an autonomous vehicle should behave, when an accident is unavoidable. Should the car kill the two passengers inside or the five pedestrians crossing the street? (Go on, try it out for yourself!) We discuss how this experiment was set up and analyze the results, after collecting more then 40 million moral decisions. Apart from being fascinating, these results are also very relevant, as self-driving cars could be driving down our roads as soon as next year, in 2020 (according to Tesla's ambitious plans to deploy a robotaxi fleet). The crowdsourced data collected by Moral Machine and similar projects will help further the discussion on how to develop software for artificial intelligence.