If an automated car had to choose between crashing into a barrier, killing its three female passengers, or running over one child in the street -- which call should it make? When three U.S.-based researchers started thinking about the future of self-driving cars, they wondered how these vehicles should make the tough ethical decisions that humans usually make instinctively. The idea prompted Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan to design an online quiz called The Moral Machine. Would you run over a man or a woman? By 2069, autonomous vehicles could be the greatest disruptor to transport since the Model T Ford was launched in Detroit in 1908.

Amid all the buzz about vehicles that drive themselves, there are serious ethical questions facing regulators, manufacturers and the people who will ride in them. If faced with an unavoidable fatal crash, would the car be programmed to save its occupants at all costs or would it sacrifice its passengers for the greater good of saving a group of pedestrians? "There's this trade-off between the interests of the driver, or rather the passenger who buys the car, and the level of public acceptance versus public outrage," says Azim Shariff of the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon. Along with researchers from France and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shariff set out to test public attitudes on the cold, hard decisions computer programs will have to make when lives are on the line. Azim Shariff, researcher at the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon, says some ethical questions should be answered before driverless cars fill the streets.