Ideas worth spreading

What moral decisions should driverless cars make?

1,275,353 views |

Iyad Rahwan |

TEDxCambridge

• September 2016

Should your driverless car kill you if it means saving five pedestrians? In this primer on the social dilemmas of driverless cars, Iyad Rahwan explores how the technology will challenge our morality and explains his work collecting data from real people on the ethical trade-offs we're willing (and not willing) to make.

Should your driverless car kill you if it means saving five pedestrians? In this primer on the social dilemmas of driverless cars, Iyad Rahwan explores how the technology will challenge our morality and explains his work collecting data from real people on the ethical trade-offs we're willing (and not willing) to make.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxCambridge, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.

Participate in research on the hypothetical ethical dilemmas faced driverless cars and learn more about the difficulties faced by programmers of artificial intelligence systems.

About the speaker

Iyad Rahwan

Computational social scientist

See speaker profile

Iyad Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation and the social aspects of artificial intelligence.

Azim Shariff, Iyad Rahwan and Jean-François Bonnefon | New York Times, 2016 | Article

"Whose Life Should Your Car Save?"

In this New York Times article, my collaborators Azim Shariff, Jean-Francois and I make a case for the importance of understanding the psychological barriers facing trust in autonomous vehicles. If we ignore those barriers and focus only on the engineering challenges, we risk delaying the adoption of driverless cars even if they are much safer.

Patrick Lin | Forbes, 2017 | Article

"Robot Cars And Fake Ethical Dilemmas"

Patrick explores the main critiques of the Trolley Problem paradigm for thinking about driverless car ethics. He explores why the through experiments can be useful, despite being overly simplistic, or perhaps precisely because of that.

Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen | Oxford University Press, 2010 | Book

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

Written by two philosophers, this book explores the broader philosophical and ethical challenges of building moral Artificial Intelligence. It shows the standard ethical theories do not seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed.

Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, Iyad Rahwan | Science, 2016 | Article

"The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles"

This article reports the detailed experiments we ran on the ethics of autonomous vehicles, and which I summarize in the talk. You can find a free pre-print of the research paper here.

About TEDx

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED's mission, "ideas worth spreading." It supports independent organizers who want to create a TED-like event in their own community.

Find a TEDx event near you

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxCambridge, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.

Participate in research on the hypothetical ethical dilemmas faced driverless cars and learn more about the difficulties faced by programmers of artificial intelligence systems.