web adventure by reece

Several weeks ago I wrote a walk-through of MIT's Moral Machine, which aims to gain a human perspective on the decisions that self driving cars may have to make in the future. You should read that post here before you read this post. This reflection contains my thoughts on the moral machine, and what I would change about it. What is the Moral Machine? An example scenario from MIT's Moral Machine The website presents us with a scenario where the brakes on a self driving car have gone bad. The vehicle is careening towards a crosswalk of pedestrians, and the car has a decision to make - to switch lanes, or not to switch lanes. You are presented with 13 different scenarios in this context, but there are various parameters that will change between them. Each scenario has different numbers of people in the car and pedestrians on the crosswalk. In some scenarios, you have to choose whether the car will crash in to a concrete barrier, which would kill all passengers in t...

This summer, I am working on a project that will be used as a educational tool for computing ethics. Exciting stuff. It actually is pretty sweet, and I'll detail that project in a later post. Educational tools for computing ethics already exist; MIT made one called "The Moral Machine". They describe it as "a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self driving cars." So, this tool is not only educating you on the decisions self driving cars may be expected to make, but also collecting your data as research in the process. In this post, I'm gonna judge scenarios in the moral machine and walk through my decision process. If you have not completed MIT's Moral Machine yourself, please do so before reading the rest of this post. You can judge moral dilemmas here . In each of the following scenarios, we will view a self driving car that is careening towards a cross walk and has suffered from a ...