With driverless cars, we’re ceding the split-second decision—sometimes pertaining to life and death—to a software program. This raises many ethical issues, such as whether a vehicle should swerve to hit two elderly people instead of one young person. This type of ethical dilemma is based on the hypothetical trolley problem. Germany has gotten in front of this ethical issue with new regulations determining that these vehicles should operate in a manner that would cause the least amount of injury, regardless of age, race or another factor. Researchers at MIT and Carnegie-Mellon propose using AI software and a crowd sourcing model to determine the appropriate ethical behavior that would be programmed into AI systems for these types of situations.
More>>