Morality to take a back seat in AI driving

"Figuring out how to build ethical autonomous machines is one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence today," researchers from the University of Toulouse and MIT's Media Lab argue in their paper in the journal Science on a survey that tries to work out how moral people want their self-driving cars to be. But is it the thorniest challenge? I'd argue the thorniest problem is working out some form of AI that is even capable of making ethical decisions. Self-driving algorithms have some way to go before we can even begin to consider whether they can weigh up the ethics of a situation along similar lines to Isaac Asimov's famous three laws. And you then have the knotty problem of determining what is truly ethical.