Researchers have developed a new experiment to better understand what people view as moral and immoral decisions related to driving vehicles, with the goal of collecting data to train autonomous vehicles how to make “good” decisions. The work is designed to capture a more realistic array of moral challenges in traffic than the widely discussed life-and-death scenario inspired by the so-called “trolley problem.”
The paper, “Moral judgment in realistic traffic scenarios: Moving beyond the trolley paradigm for ethics of autonomous vehicles,” is published open access in the journal AI & Society.
“The trolley problem presents a situation in which someone has to decide whether to intentionally kill one person (which violates a moral norm) in order to avoid the death of multiple people,” says Dario Cecchini, first author of a paper on the work and a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University.
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