New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar - The Moral Machine Experiment

The New St Cross Special Ethics Seminars are jointly organised by the Oxford Uehiro Centre and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities

Abstract

I describe the Moral Machine, an internet-based serious game exploring the many-dimensional ethical dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. The game enabled us to gather 40 million decisions from 3 million people in 200 countries/territories. I report the various preferences estimated from this data, and document interpersonal differences in the strength of these preferences. I also report cross-cultural ethical variation and uncover major clusters of countries exhibiting substantial differences along key moral preferences. These differences correlate with modern institutions, but also with deep cultural traits. I discuss how these three layers of preferences can help progress toward global, harmonious, and socially acceptable principles for machine ethics. Finally, I describe other follow up work that build on this project.

Bio

Edmond Awad is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. He is also an Associate Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and a Founding Editorial Board member of the AI and Ethics Journal (Springer Nature). Before joining the University of Exeter, Edmond was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab (2017-2019). In 2016, Edmond led the design and development of Moral Machine,  a website that gathers human decisions on moral dilemmas faced by driverless cars. The website has been visited by over 9 million users, who contributed their judgements on 100 million dilemmas. Another website that Edmond co-created, called MyGoodness, collected judgements over 3 million charity dilemmas. Edmond’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and it has been covered in major media outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. Edmond has a bachelor degree (2007) in Informatics Engineering from Tishreen University (Syria), a master’s degree (2011) in Computing and Information Science and a PhD (2015) in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Masdar Institute (now Khalifa University; UAE), and a master’s degree (2017) in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Edmond’s research interests are in the areas of AI, Ethics, Computational Social Science and Multi-agent Systems.

Registration

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