The Tricky Business of Computing Ethical Values

An expert in computing responds to Tara Isabella Burton's "I Know Thy Works." In 2018 researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, Harvard University, the University of British Columbia, and Université Toulouse Capitole shared the results of one of the largest moral experiments conducted to date. They recorded 40 million ethical decisions from millions of people across 233 countries. The experiment's "Moral Machine" posed to users variations of the classic trolley problem, imagining instead the trolley as a self-driving car. Should the car swerve and collide with jaywalking pedestrians or maintain its current trajectory, which would yield inevitable doom for the passengers inside?