The Moral Machine experiment
Name
Moral Machine Paper.pdf
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737.39 KB
Format
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Author(s)
Awad, Edmond
Dsouza, Sohan
Kim, Richard
Schulz, Jonathan
Henrich, Joseph
Shariff, Azim
Bonnefon, Jean-François
Rahwan, Iyad
Date Issued
October 2018
Journal
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Awad, E. et al. "The Moral Machine experiment." Nature 563, 7729 (October 2018): 59–64 © 2018 Springer Nature Limited
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6
