Put the Morals of Self-Driving Cars to the Test

Meet the Moral Machine, which echoes a standard many people hope self-driving cars can achieve.

1 minute read

August 9, 2016, 7:00 AM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


The Scalable Cooperation research group at the MIT Media Lab announces the creation of a test of moral quandaries, called Moral Machine, designed to gather crowdsourced information about the implications of machine intelligence—especially self-driving cars.

Here's how Scalable Cooperation explains the Moral Machine: "We show you moral dilemmas, where a driverless car must choose the lesser of two evils, such as killing two passengers or five pedestrians."

A recent Planetizen feature by Antonio Loro dug into the many, many moral and ethical implications of self-driving cars—an avenue that will become more and more worthy of deep investigation as the technology gains traction in the market.

Saturday, July 30, 2016 in Moral Machine

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

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