Machines Becoming Moral - Part 2 - Nigel Crook

In my book'Rise of the Moral Machine: Exploring Virtue Through a Robot's Eyes', I include a short fictional story about a couple (Mr and Mrs Morales) who are in the process of purchasing their first autonomous vehicle. Having chosen the model, the colour and the trim of the car, the last set of choices they are required to make concern the vehicle's'ethical alignment': i.e. the alignment of the vehicle's autonomous decisions on how it should drive with the Morales' social and ethical preferences. Without giving too much of the story away, the Morales' are presented with a series of situations each of which requires the autonomous vehicle to make a moral decision. These decisions are presented in terms of choices of who should be the casualties of an unavoidable collision, such as "should the vehicle run over the pensioner on the pedestrian crossing, or the child on the pavement?" (Figure 1).