A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making

The problem of ethical decision making, which has long been a grand challenge for AI [23], has recently caught the public imagination. Perhaps its best-known manifestation is a modern variant of the classic trolley problem [10]: An autonomous vehicle has a brake failure, leading to an accident with inevitably tragic consequences; due to the vehicle's superior perception and computation capabilities, it can make an informed decision. Should it stay its course and hit a wall, killing its three passengers, one of whom is a young girl? Or swerve and kill a male athlete and his dog, who are crossing the street on a red light? A notable paper by Bonnefon et al. [2] has shed some light on how people address such questions, and even former US President Barack Obama has weighed in.