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.

Keywords

Variation (astronomy)DemographicsMoral dilemmaThe InternetSocial psychologyPsychologyData scienceSociologyPolitical scienceComputer scienceWorld Wide Web

MeSH Terms

AccidentsTrafficArtificial IntelligenceData CollectionDecision MakingFemaleHarm ReductionHumansInternationalityInternetMaleMoralsMotor VehiclesPedestriansPublic OpinionRoboticsTranslating

Affiliated Institutions

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Publication Info

Year
2018
Type
article
Volume
563
Issue
7729
Pages
59-64
Citations
1643
Access
Closed

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1643
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80
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Cite This

Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim et al. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature , 563 (7729) , 59-64. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6

Identifiers

DOI
10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6
PMID
30356211

Data Quality

Data completeness: 86%