The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?
The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars.

Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision—to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death.

In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people —eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories—to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it.

Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.
1138610527
The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?
The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars.

Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision—to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death.

In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people —eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories—to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it.

Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.
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The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?

The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?

by Jean-Francois Bonnefon
The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?

The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?

by Jean-Francois Bonnefon

Hardcover

$22.95 
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Overview

The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars.

Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision—to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death.

In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people —eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories—to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it.

Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262045797
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 10/12/2021
Pages: 176
Sales rank: 623,195
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jean-François Bonnefon is Research Director at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and President of a European Commission expert group that advises on the ethics of driverless mobility.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii
1 A Technological Thriller 1
2 Dubai, May 2015 5
3 Merlin's Laugh 9
4 The Right Questions 13
5 The First Experiment 19
6 Initial Setbacks 23
7 "Programmed to Kill" 27
8 The Social Dilemma 31
9 The Meta-Trolley 35
10 The Birth of Moral Machine 39
11 A Race Against the Clock 45
12 Zero Hour 51
13 Viral 55
14 Mercedes-Benz vs. Barack Obama 63
15 The Code of Berlin 69
16 90 Percent of Accidents 79
17 Harry Potter and the Self-Driving Car 87
18 The Uber Accident 93
19 Who's Afraid of Driverless Cars? 99
20 Forty Million Responses 105
21 An Ethics Top-Three 113
22 Cultural Variations of Morality 119
23 "We Must Show Some Blood" 127
24 We Have to Step Up 135
25 What Now? 141
Notes 149

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon provides a vivid description of key discoveries regarding ethical aspects of machines endowed with artificial intelligence. This wonderful account of the scientific process and of the science itself asks and answers fundamental questions regarding the world we increasingly inhabit—a world that is a hybrid system of humans and machines. Machines are already interacting with us in potentially beneficial and harmful ways, and they will soon change how we treat each other as well. The Car That Knew Too Much is a primer for the future.”
Nicholas A. Christakis, author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
 
“On the face of it, this book is about the ethics of autonomous vehicles, a miraculous new technology that could change life as we know it. But it actually offers a probing analysis of difficult moral dilemmas brought on by technological advancement generally, along with moral questions that we face merely because we are human. As a bonus, the narrative is enlivened by an honest and insightful case study in the sociology of interdisciplinary science.”
Steve Sloman, Professor of Cognitive Science, Brown University

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