The Twisted Game ‘Moral Machine’ Forces You to Choose Whom Your Self-Driving Car Should Run Over
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MIT researchers have developed a macabre video game in which you are given the gruesome task of deciding whom your self-driving car should run over. The game is called Moral Machine and is available for free online for your entertainment. The set-up itself is quite simple, ethically complex though it may be.
The game, which is a variant of the classic trolley problem, posits that you are in a self-driving car and presents you with a nightmarish choice: either stay on your path and barrel into pedestrians crossing the street or swerve and crash into a barrier, killing everyone in the car.
It asks you to decide what the self-driving car ought to do based on information about the pedestrians and passengers, given that someone must die. For instance, how would you choose if the one pedestrian crossing the street happened to be a world-class doctor whereas the four car passengers were merely cashiers? Do the lives of four passengers outweigh that of the one doctor who could potentially save dozens of lives?
After you go through a number of these scenarios, the game presents you with an assessment of your moral calculus, analyzing your choices to come up with a hierarchy of the value of human life. Perhaps doctors lie at the pinnacle of your hierarchy while vagrants and criminals are at the bottom.
The point of the game is to raise a simple, yet consequential ethical dilemma. That is, if we are forced to choose, by what calculus do we weigh the value of lives and determine who dies?
Why is it necessary to even ponder such a grisly scenario, you may ask. The reason, according to the MIT researchers who devised the game, is that as autonomous and intelligent machines are increasingly assigned tasks which humans were once responsible for, it is almost inevitable that they will be faced with split-second life or death decisions.
As such, the point of the game is to raise awareness of the ethical dimensions of and issues associated with machine intelligence and further public discourse.
What they conveniently leave unmentioned is that such research may actually influence how autonomous machines are programmed to handle such circumstances and result in self-driving cars that are empowered to act as judge and executioner.
