Article in Nature: The Moral Machine experiment
Working together with Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Johnathan Friedemann Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan, Azim published a paper in Nature in October 2018. It reports a worldwide study examining how people think about the moral decisions machines might make in the future. The link to the paper can be found here, and the abstract is included below.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Machine, an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment. First, we summarize global moral preferences. Second, we document individual variations in preferences, based on respondents’ demographics. Third, we report cross-cultural ethical variation, and uncover three major clusters of countries. Fourth, we show that these differences correlate with modern institutions and deep cultural traits. We discuss how these preferences can contribute to developing global, socially acceptable principles for machine ethics. All data used in this article are publicly available.