As autonomous vehicles become more ubiquitous, thinking about the ethical dilemma of the trolley problem is more pertinent now than ever.
The trolley problem is a renowned thought experiment in the field of ethics and it asks an individual this: If you were in control of the switch that can redirect a moving trolley on a track where there are five incapacitated people, versus one incapacitated person on a side track, would you do nothing and allow the trolley to run over five people on the main track or divert the trolley and kill one person on the side track?
As one can imagine, the trolley problem has been a subject of debate as it pertains to autonomous vehicles and has urged philosophers to work with engineers to write algorithms addressing this ethical dilemma, allowing them to reimagine the trolley problem in different scenarios and think about how a driverless car would respond.
And some MIT academics thought it would be a great idea to crowdsource the globe's intelligence on the subject and see if there are differences in the way people respond to ethical conundrums in different parts of the world. The paper titled, 'The Moral Machine Experiment,' is based on a global survey with over 2 million online participants from 200 countries. The paper presents results of data collected over a period of 18 months where participants played a gamified recreation of the trolley problem.
"There were two goals of the survey," said Edmond Awad, a postdoc at MIT's Media Lab and lead author of the paper. "One was to spark discussion on the topic and the other one to collect data about multiple factors that influence people’s decisions," Awad said.
The results published in the paper highlight the cultural and economic variations between countries. The paper groups the participating countries into three clusters: The western cluster, comprising North America as well as many European countries of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian cultural groups. The eastern cluster, comprising of far eastern countries such as Japan and Taiwan that belong to the Confucianist cultural group, and Islamic countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and lastly, the southern cluster, which consists of Latin American countries in Central and South America, in addition to some countries that are characterized in part by French influence like some French overseas territories.
The most emphatic global preferences in the survey that stood out were more or less universal -- like people preferred sparing the lives of humans over the lives of other animals; sparing the lives of many people rather than a few; and preserving the lives of the young, rather than older people. But looking at granular details, some regional differences prevailed.
The eastern culture was the least in favor of sparing the young for the elderly. And while nearly all countries and participants showed a preference for female characters, the preference for sparing females over males was stronger in nations with better health and survival prospects for women. And countries where laws are respected and upheld were more in favor of sparing the law-abiding pedestrians. The full country-wise breakdown of the survey results can be found here.
When asked about the paper's purpose or implications, Awad noted that the paper is meant to highlight differences that should be considered while drafting policies.
"We wanted to highlight there are moral decisions to be made by driverless cars and those are subtle than one can imagine," Awad said. "It might be hard to find one unified set of rules - there might be stronger pushback from one country to another on a certain issue."
The team at MIT that worked on the paper is also in discussions with some auto companies like Ford and Audi to collaborate on the topic.
