New study gives tough driverless ethics quiz to millions of people

In the not-too-distant future, driverless cars may have to choose between saving their passengers or pedestrians when faced with unavoidable accidents. But how should they decide?

It’s one of the thorniest issues faced by policymakers and manufacturers as we edge closer to a future where autonomous vehicles fill our roads, and a new study offers some potential principles based on a survey of millions of people.

The researchers behind the study designed an online quiz with a variety of tough scenarios: should a car favor the lives of the young, or the old? Should it save the fit over the infirm? Is saving more lives always preferable to saving fewer?

They wanted to see if people around the world would settle on some fundamental guidelines.

“We identified three main principles on which people more or less agreed,” said Jean-Francois Bonnefon, study coauthor and a professor at the Toulouse School of Economics.

They were: “protect human life (over animals), save the largest number of people, and place priority on saving children,” he told AFP.

“But even with these strong preferences there was variation from one country to another.”

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, found sometimes surprising differences among regions, including a “strong preference for sparing women and... fit characters” in France and French-influenced areas, as well as countries in Latin America.

“But the fact that broad regions of the world displayed relative agreement suggests that our journey to consensual machine ethics is not doomed from the start,” the study said.

The quiz, dubbed the “Moral Machine,” was put online in June 2016 in 10 languages, and the study is based on responses over an 18-month period.

So far, more than two million people have taken the test, which remains online.

Edmond Awad, a postdoctoral associate at MIT and first author of the study, said the data was intended to help guide policymakers.