“A new study shows that most people prefer that self-driving cars be programmed to save the most people in the event of an accident, even if it kills the driver,” reports Information Week. “Unless they are the drivers.” Slashdot reader MojoKid quotes an article from Hot Hardware about the new study, which was published by Science magazine.
So if there is just one passenger aboard a car, and the lives of 10 pedestrians are at stake, the survey participants were perfectly fine with a self-driving car “killing” its passenger to save many more lives in return. But on the flip side, these same participants said that if they were shopping for a car to purchase or were a passenger, they would prefer to be within a vehicle that would protect their lives by any means necessary. Participants also balked at the notion of the government stepping in to regulate the “morality brain” of self-driving cars.
The article warns about a future where “a harsh AI reality may whittle the worth of our very existence down to simple, unemotional percentages in a computer’s brain.” MIT’s Media Lab is now letting users judge for themselves, in a free online game called “Moral Machine” simulating the difficult decisions that might someday have to be made by an autonomous self-driving car.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Drivers Prefer Autonomous Cars That Don’t Kill Them