News. Welcome to the moral machine. A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. Such is the message when you arrive at the MoralMachine. Here you can make decisions yourself on moral dilemmas – and create them yourself.
Scenario: Your self driving car has a sudden brake failure and will drive through a pedestrian crossing – you decide how the machine shall be programmed to kill. Should it be:
- 1 criminal or 1 dog and 1 cat
- 5 homeless people or 5 female doctors
- 1 criminal, 1 homeless and may be a baby OR 1 elderly man, 1 elderly woman and may be a boy
- 5 babies or 1 man, 1 woman, 1 boy, 1 girl, 1 elderly man
And so it goes on including male and female executives, pregnant women, fat women and men, female and male athletes.
The Moral Machine is developed by a group of academics under the hat of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and it is an interesting example of the ethical dilemmas we will encounter when we have to tell the machines to choose the lesser of two evils.
The Moral Machine not only lets you test yourself and compare your solutions to others and discuss each dilemma. You can also design and submit new dilemmas. A great way to discuss ethical issues in the age of big data and machine learning and a lot of perspectives when we talk self- piloting planes, self-sailing ships etc in the future.
