Scientists have developed a system that lets users of driverless cars take the moral decision of who should survive a potential car crash.
Previous studies found that most people think a driverless car should be utilitarian, taking actions to minimise the amount of overall harm, which might mean sacrificing its own passengers in certain situations to save lives of pedestrians.
However, while people agreed to this in principle, they also said they would never get in a car that was prepared to kill them. “We wanted to explore what would happen if the control and the responsibility for a car’s actions were given back to the driver,” said Guiseppe Contissa at University of Bologna in Italy. Researchers designed a dial that switches a car’s setting along spectrum ranging from “full altruist” to “full egoist”, with middle setting being impartial.