Technical Articles From University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles

Jul 31, 2023 | Yochanan E. Bigman & Kurt Gray

How should self-driving cars make decisions when human lives hang in the balance? The Moral Machine experiment1 (MME) suggests that people want autonomous vehicles (AVs) to treat different human lives unequally, preferentially killing some people (for example, men, the old and the poor) over others (for example, women, the young and the rich). Our results challenge this idea, revealing that this apparent preference for inequality is driven by the specific ‘trolley-type’ paradigm used by the MME. Multiple studies with a revised paradigm reveal that people overwhelmingly want autonomous vehicles to treat different human lives equally in life and death situations, ignoring gender, age and status—a preference consistent with a general desire for equality