trolley problem

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right

by Michael Brooks  · 23 Apr 2020  · 88pp  · 26,706 words

bring two moral principles into conflict in order to discover which one we care more about. The most famous thought experiment is the so-called “Trolley Problem,” which was originally formulated by the British philosopher Philippa Foot, though the version that most people are familiar with incorporates a change suggested by the

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is worse than letting die. Other philosophers are ‘consequentialists,’ meaning that they believe morality is fundamentally about maximizing good consequences. The consequentialist approach to the Trolley Problem is to make whatever decision—in this case, turning the trolley to the right—that will result in the fewest deaths. When they first hear

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Foot’s version of the Trolley Problem, the majority of people have a consequentialist reaction. (Or their eyes glaze over, as yours might be doing. Just give me a minute here. This

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Edward to do is to turn the trolley to the right, killing the one person to save the five. Nevertheless, Judith Jarvis Thomson amended the Trolley Problem in such a way that, when hearing her version, people have the opposite reaction. Here is Thomson’s version of the problem: George is on

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track in the path of the trolley, or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five die. When presented with this version of the Trolley Problem, most people refuse to sacrifice the fat man’s life to save the five people. In other words, though on the face of it the

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moral calculation in both Trolley Problems is the same—in both versions of the story, one person dies to save five—the different responses that people give demonstrate that in real

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life, people distinguish between actively participating in a killing and letting someone die. Whatever you think about the solutions to the Trolley Problems, you can see the point of the thought experiment. Two principles are being pitted against each other to test which one we think ‘outranks’ the

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

by Alexander McCall Smith  · 22 Sep 2008  · 223pp  · 66,428 words

that I have recently completed and that I think is suitable for publication in the Review. You may be familiar, of course, with the famous Trolley Problem that Philippa Foot raised all those years ago in Virtues and Vices. I have recently given this matter considerable thought and feel that I have

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be familiar with: that may have sounded innocuous, but was in reality a piece of naked condescension. Of course she would be familiar with the Trolley Problem, one of the most famous thought experiments of twentieth-century philosophy—and twenty-first-century philosophy, too, as the problem continued to rumble along, as

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meetings would be restricted to those with posts in the universities, Party men every one of them. Dove…She thought of his paper on the Trolley Problem; she felt a vague unease about that, and she felt that there would be more to come. But Brecht and the GDR, and even Dove

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reader. That was what she had hoped for, and she caught her breath when she saw it. She had sent Dove’s paper on the Trolley Problem to two referees, as was normal with any unsolicited paper. She had been scrupulously careful in her choice of referees; it would have been easy

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. CHAPTER FIFTEEN SHE WAS IN THE GARDEN the next morning, Sunday, with Charlie when she made her decision about Christopher Dove’s paper on the Trolley Problem. It was nothing that Charlie had said—he had several sounds at his command, one of which could have been Dove, but was more likely

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Dear Professor Dove, and with that resolved, the rest proved easy: It was most thoughtful of you to offer me this excellent piece on the Trolley Problem. How these old problems still provide us with fresh food for thought! That is what I thought, at least, but then quot homines tot sententiae

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would not be the agent of Nemesis, not this time, not now. “Dear Christopher,” she wrote. “Thank you for sending me that piece on the Trolley Problem. Yes, we shall publish this. Not this issue but the next. Warmest wishes, Isabel.” She pressed the key that would print the letter on the

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving

by Jason Torchinsky  · 6 May 2019  · 175pp  · 54,755 words

’re hypocrites because humanity is basically a collection of all kinds of often miserable jackasses who wouldn’t know the best ethical solution to the trolley problem if it shoved its ethical and hypothetical tongue in their nostril, and just about all of those miserable jackasses have car keys. Oh, and in

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case you’re not familiar with it, I’ll explain the trolley problem soon. The recent interest in autonomous vehicles has made this fifty-two-year-old thought experiment surprisingly popular, so, don’t worry, before you fling

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look into this aspect first, and think about how future robotic cars will deal with a confusing world. This means we should probably address the trolley problem first, since almost every discussion of autonomous car ethics will bring this up, and I’ve put it off as long as I could. The

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first “officially” stated by the British philosopher, ethicist, and hilarious-name-haver Philippa Foot in 1967. Foot’s original description of the trolley problem reads like this: Edward is the driver of a trolley, whose brakes have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people; the

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this is that it deeply sucks to be Edward, and whatever they’re paying him is not enough. Aside from that, the core of the trolley problem is the question: is it worth the death of one person to save five? As you can imagine, this could be important to a self

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tacos and eternal kittens to the world. Would the sheer number of lives saved be the deciding factor here? Philippa Foot herself further complicated the trolley problem with this variant: George is on a footbridge over the trolley tracks. He knows trolleys, and can see that the one approaching the bridge is

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murdering the poor fat man to save the five people. Is this difference actually significant? Does anything about the trolley problem really matter? The truth is that, in reality, I don’t think the trolley problem is really a likely dilemma that autonomous cars will face. Sure, they may end up in situations where

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sacrifice of life is unavoidable, but the idea that the robotic vehicles will have access to all the information that makes up the trolley problem—the number of passengers in the vehicle, specifically—is by no means assured, and as such is not likely to be a factor in the

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or hinder the outcome, as well as such factors as weather, visibility, and the ability of the car’s structure to protect the occupants. The trolley problem is too much of an abstract thought experiment to be really useful or worth worrying about. The real world is so much more messy and

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it addresses my recurring nightmare that robotic vehicles will decide if you’re worth saving based on your credit score (rule 9). Situations like the trolley problem are addressed in several of the rules (rules 5, 8, and 9) and it’s suggested that when these dilemmas do arise, an independent agency

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2, 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one -person-to-save-five-57111. 54 Thompson, Judith, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” The Monist: An International Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry, vol. 59, 1976, https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/david.poston/phil1301.80361/readings-for-march-31

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.pdf. 55 Khazan, Olga, “Is One of the Most Popular Psychology Experiments Worthless?” The Atlantic, July 24, 2014. 56 Thompson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” pp. 207–208. 57 Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, German Government Ethics Commission on Automated and Connected Driving, Report, June 2017, pp. 10

Willful: How We Choose What We Do

by Richard Robb  · 12 Nov 2019  · 202pp  · 58,823 words

-itself decision-making can be demonstrated by looking at two enduring moral puzzles: the merchant’s choice posed by Cicero in 44 BCE and the trolley problem posed by Philippa Foot in 1967.3 The merchant’s choice belongs in the purposeful category, where options can be evaluated, ranked, and traded. Choices

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in the trolley problem, however, depend ultimately on impulse—attempts to calculate the trade-offs are swamped by an individual exercise of will. Action (or inaction) is for-itself

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necessary calculations to rationally balance concern for public welfare, private gain, and ethical principles. At the opposite extreme from the merchant’s choice is the trolley problem. There are many versions of the thought experiment originally posed by Philippa Foot; in one of the most famous, five people are standing on trolley

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a particular response—a utilitarian might favor pushing, while a Kantian might not. For effective altruists, utilitarians, and Kantians, the moral considerations arising from the trolley problem fit with purposeful choice. As long as they don’t abandon their principles at the crucial moment, their actions should be predictable. For the rest

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of us, though, it might not be so easy. The trolley problem is carefully constructed so that there is no Pareto-efficient solution. Variations of the problem that deal with injury, where everyone can be made better

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’t push, since the cost of breaking his arm likely exceeds the sum cost of breaking the arms of five random people. In the actual trolley problem, though, he can’t be compensated for blocking the trolley since he’ll be dead. I don’t think we can resort to a “veil

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on the tracks and I had a one-sixth chance of each, of course I would choose “push.” But that doesn’t help with the trolley problem. It is already resolved who will be the fat man and that’s the individual you’d have to kill. In the end, I probably

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going to encourage you to do it, though—that’s too close to pushing myself. What would Antipater and Diogenes have to say about the trolley problem? They could talk all day, debating ethical rules and practical consequences. But while they might convince me to take one side or the other in

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the merchant’s problem, they almost certainly couldn’t convince me that there’s a correct solution to the trolley problem. My point is not to sermonize on which actions are right or wrong, but rather to consider how we do behave when actions have moral

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unifying system that dictates which principle should trump the others, the problem is fundamentally for-itself. Computing the Monetary Value of a Life If the trolley problem were posed to you, you might refuse to answer. You could say, “I don’t know. It would depend on countless particulars, and I don

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perfectly fine answer for an individual confronted with hypotheticals, but in the arena of public policy, society cannot avoid addressing real-world analogs to the trolley problem. Whom should we save when resources are limited? How much should we spend to save them? Should we raise the speed limit to reduce the

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refers to a tendency to favor inaction in decisions with moral consequences. Many people who would be unlikely to push the fat man in the trolley problem would be even less likely to catch him if he slipped on a banana peel and was about to fall onto the tracks and save

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would wait to make their purchase, thereby driving prices down before the next ships arrive and allowing poorer, hungrier people to eat sooner. 6. Thomson, “Trolley Problem,” 1397–1399. 7. If we can truly exclude the possibility of the questioner cheating, however, then odds of 1 in a trillion for $0.25

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, 2006. Thaler, Richard H. “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1 (1980): 39–60. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “The Trolley Problem.” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 (1985): 1395–1415. Tversky, Amos, and Eldar Shafir. “The Disjunction Effect in Choice under Uncertainty.” Psychological Science 3, no

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of, 42, 44, 200–201 out-of-character trading as, 68–69 purposeful choice commingled with, 40–43, 129, 171 rationalizations for, 194–195 in trolley problem, 137 unemployment and, 186 France, 191 Fuji Bank, 14 futures, 80–81 gain-loss asymmetry, 10–11 Galperti, Simone, 217n1 gambler’s fallacy, 199 gamifying

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efficiency linked to, 132 rational choice distinguished from, 22–23 regret linked to, 128 social relations linked to, 28 stable preferences linked to, 33 in trolley problem, 135–136 vaccination and, 58–59 wage increases and, 187. See also rational choice quests, 30–31 Rapaczynski, Andrzej, 220n24 Raskob, John Jakob, 211–212n12

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-tat, in repeated games, 105 transaction costs, 64, 70, 78 transitivity of preferences, 158–159 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 209n5 “tricky profit,” 18–21 trolley problem, 133, 135–137 tulipmania, 212n1 Tversky, Amos, 168, 174 Twain, Mark, 60 ultimatum game, 107–108, 207 uncertainty, about future, 25, 153, 181–185 unique

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan  · 18 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 80,835 words

was in charge at the time of the accident. Trolleyology In philosophy circles, there’s an ethical question to explore this phenomenon, known as the trolley problem. It challenges that if you had to push one large person in front of a moving trolley to save a group of people on the

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a trolley-style situation where not everybody can be saved but relative value choices need to be made? In an interesting public exploration of the trolley problem in the context of driverless cars, MIT have created a website[291] offering users the chance to choose their preferred outcome in a variety of

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scenarios. The MIT reworking of the trolley problem replaces the trolley with a driverless car experiencing brake failure. The experiment depicts 13 variations of the “trolley problem”, asking users to decide who should perish, which involves agonising priority choices: more deaths against fewer

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known as Deontology. This suggests that there are certain absolute values such as the notion that intentional killing is always wrong. In relation to the Trolley problem, this means that even if shifting the trolley will save five lives, we shouldn't do it because we would be actively killing one. In

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that the CDC estimates[297] were caused by human recognition errors. So before we allow driverless cars development to get too distracted with solving the trolley problem, let’s consider how humans respond. I’ve never heard of a real-life situation where a human had to make a trolley-style choice

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fear. So programming cars for the best possible outcome, even if unfavourable, adds a degree of certainty we don't currently have. The driverless cars trolley problem discussions portend many forthcoming debates about ethics in the time of Artificial Intelligence and how we will hold machines to different standards than we do

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humans. We don’t endlessly debate the trolley problem for human drivers, nor is it part of any driver test. Patrick Lin, a philosopher at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and a

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their passengers to likely greater harm than themselves. Concluding the Debate A quick review of driverless cars commentary to date reveals much discussion about the trolley problem. I don’t see this as an insurmountable issue. It’s incredibly rare and unlikely and there may well be no clear ideal agreed outcome

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guarantee that the predicted outcome will happen - a car may “intend” to protect its occupants but who knows what will happen….I think that the trolley problem poses interesting questions and merits discussion, but if we allow the debate to continue for too long, thereby delaying driverless cars, we are guilty of

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and indulging philosophers at the expense of saving lives. I’ll conclude this section on ethics with a diagram that I think neatly summarises the trolley problem: Image courtesy Caleb Watney (https://twitter.com/CalebWatney) Transition A new kind of vehicle has taken to the roads, and people aren’t sure what

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky  · 1 May 2017  · 1,261pp  · 294,715 words

Harvard and Princeton’s Cohen showed how the “emotional” and “cognitive” parts of the brain can somewhat dissociate.66 They used philosophy’s famous “runaway trolley” problem, where a trolley is bearing down on five people and you must decide if it’s okay to kill one person to save the five

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and colleagues helped jump-start “neuroethics” by exploring these questions using the poster child of “Do the ends justify the means?” philosophizing, namely the runaway trolley problem. A trolley’s brake has failed, and it is hurtling down the tracks and will hit and kill five people. Is it okay to do

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, see punishment reasoning in, 169, 478–81, 487–88, 507–8, 542 in adolescents, 167–69 in children, 182–83 in infants, 483–84 runaway trolley problem (killing one person to save five) and, 55, 56, 58–59, 117, 482, 488–91, 505–7 self-driving cars and, 612n saving person vs

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, 170–71, 589, 590, 592 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 396 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 305, 309, 325, 616 Rozin, Paul, 399, 562 Rudolph, Wilma, 596 runaway trolley problem (killing one person to save five), 55, 56, 58–59, 117, 482, 488–91, 505–7 self-driving cars and, 612n Russell, Jeffrey, 606 Rwanda

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Treachery of Images, The (Magritte), 556–57, 556 Trench Warfare: 1914–1918 (Ashworth), 665, 666 Trip to the Moon, A, 398 Trivers, Robert, 344, 384 trolley problem (killing one person to save five), 55, 56, 58–59, 117, 482, 488–91, 505–7 self-driving cars and, 612n trust, 112–13, 116

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there was no monkey in the adjacent space, the choice would be random as to what food was deposited in the second space. * Actually, the trolley problem was invented by the British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. * And as alluded to earlier, people with vmPFC damage are strongly and equally willing to

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

by Kevin Dutton  · 15 Oct 2012  · 280pp  · 85,091 words

person’s life in the balance. But who is this unscrupulous minority? Who is this 10 percent? To find out, Bartels and Pizarro presented the trolley problem to more than two hundred students, and got them to indicate on a four-point scale how much they were in favor of shoving the

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—possibly be linked? Bartels and Pizarro wondered. The answer was a resounding yes. Their analysis revealed a significant correlation between a utilitarian approach to the trolley problem (push the fat guy off the bridge) and a predominantly psychopathic personality style. Which, as far as Robin Dunbar’s prediction goes, is pretty much

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Kiehl and his coauthors also included a third type of dilemma, which they termed “impersonal.” This took the form of the original version of the Trolley Problem devised by Philippa Foot (see chapter 1), in which the choice (initiated by the flick of a switch) is whether to divert a runaway train

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in Psychopathy,” Molecular Psychiatry 14 (January 2009): 5–6, doi:10.1038/mp.2008.104. 10 Consider, for example, the following conundrum (case 1) … The Trolley Problem was first proposed in this form by Philippa Foot in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices

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Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 11 Now consider the following variation (case 2) … See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” The Monist 59, no. 2 (1976): 204–17. 12 Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell … See Daniel M. Bartels and David

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at www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.pdf. 19 This moral conundrum was first put forward by Judith Jarvis Thomson … See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 (1985): 1395–1415. 20 In 1980, Robert Hare (whom we met in chapter 1) unveiled the Psychopathy Checklist … See

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer  · 1 Jan 2015  · 197pp  · 59,656 words

to do the most good we can. In a study of the role of emotion in moral decision making, subjects were presented with so-called trolley problem dilemmas in which, for example, a runaway trolley is heading for a tunnel in which there are five people, and it will kill them all

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those who made consistently utilitarian judgments and those who did not. Neither did demographic or cultural differences, including age, gender, education, and religiosity.12 Another trolley problem study used virtual reality technology to give people a more vivid sense of being in the situation in which they must decide whether to throw

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attitudes. An early piece of evidence for this view came from a study in which Greene and his colleagues asked people to make judgments about trolley problems and similar moral dilemmas while images were being taken of their brain activity. The study showed increased activity in brain areas associated with cognitive control

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, “The Baby in the Well.” 12. Gleichgerrcht and Young, “Low Levels of Empathic Concern,” e60418. For an entertaining discussion of trolley problems, see David Edmonds, Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 13. C. D. Navarrete, M

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. M. McDonald, M. L. Mott, and B. Asher, “Virtual Morality: Emotion and Action in a Simulated Three-Dimensional ‘Trolley Problem,’” Emotion 12 (2011): 364–70. I owe this reference to Gleichgerrcht and Young. 14. Bloom, “The Baby in the Well.” 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of

The Road to Conscious Machines

by Michael Wooldridge  · 2 Nov 2018  · 346pp  · 97,890 words

for AI – don’t necessarily help us, how should we think about the acceptable behaviour of AI systems? We Need to Stop Talking about the Trolley Problem Asimov’s laws can be seen as the first and most famous attempt to formulate an overarching framework to govern decision-making in AI systems

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direction. We’ll begin our survey with one particular scenario which has attracted more attention in the ethical AI community than perhaps any other. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment in the philosophy of ethics, originally introduced by British philosopher Philippa Foot in the late 1960s.7 Her aim in introducing

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to disentangle some of the highly emotive issues surrounding the morality of abortion. There are many versions of Foot’s trolley problem, but the most common version goes something like this (see Figure 21): A trolley (i.e. a tram) has gone out of control, and is

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you pull the lever, then this person would be killed, but the five others would be saved. Should you pull the lever or not? The Trolley Problem has risen rapidly in prominence recently because of the imminent arrival of driverless cars. Pundits were quick to point out that driverless cars might well

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find themselves in a situation like the Trolley Problem, and AI software would then be called upon to make an impossible choice. ‘Self-driving cars are already deciding who to kill’ ran one Internet

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an attentive audience for their opinions on what had hitherto been a rather obscure problem in the philosophy of ethics. Despite its apparent simplicity, the Trolley Problem raises some surprisingly complex issues. My intuitive response to the problem is, all other things being equal, I would pull the lever because it would

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is someone who acts in order to maximize social welfare, where this is defined to be the aggregate welfare of the society. Figure 21 The Trolley Problem. If you do nothing, the five people on the upper track will die; if you pull the lever, the person on the lower track will

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principle seems appealing, making the idea of the ‘aggregate happiness of the world’ precise is not easy. For example, suppose the five individuals in the Trolley Problem are evil mass murderers, while the other individual is an innocent young child. Do the lives of five evil mass murderers outweigh that of an

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wrong, then any action which causes a death would be unacceptable. Someone who accepted such a principle would not take action in response to the Trolley Problem, since their action would cause someone’s death – even though not acting leads to five other deaths. A third standpoint is based on the idea

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straight ahead and killing five people, or swerving and killing one. So, what would and what should an AI agent do when faced with a Trolley Problem, or something like it? Well, first of all, we should ask ourselves whether it is reasonable to expect more of an AI system that we

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would expect of a person in a situation like this. If the greatest philosophical thinkers in the world cannot definitively resolve the Trolley Problem, then is it reasonable of us to expect an AI system to do so? Secondly, I should point out that I have been driving cars

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for decades, and in all that time I have never faced a Trolley Problem. Nor has anyone else I know. Moreover, what I know about ethics, and the ethics of the Trolley Problem, is roughly what you read above: I wasn’t required to pass an ethics exam to

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not been a problem for me so far. Driving a car does not require deep ethical reasoning – so requiring that driverless cars can resolve the Trolley Problem before we put them on the roads therefore seems to me a little absurd. Thirdly, the truth is that however obvious the answers to ethical

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data from about 40 million individual decisions from users in 233 countries. The data revealed fundamental differences in attitudes to ethical decision-making in the Trolley Problem across the globe. The researchers found three key ‘moral clusters’ of countries, each of which seems to embody an ethical framework with a distinctive character

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societal qualities have a clear role in predicting preferences. The MIT researchers compared their findings – how people say a driverless car should behave in a Trolley Problem situation – to some actual guidelines on ethical decision-making in cars produced by the German federal government in 2017.10 The German report made 20

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. My example is tasteless – apologies for that – but you get the point. Intriguing and ingenious though it undoubtedly is, the Moral Machine experiment and the Trolley Problem upon which it is based do not, I think, have much of value to tell us about AI software for driverless cars. I don’t

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decades will do ethical reasoning of this type. So, what would a real driverless car do in practice, when faced with a situation like the Trolley Problem? Those working on driverless car technologies are not very forthcoming about details, but my experience with AI over the last few decades suggests that the

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) Of course, there are much wider issues around AI and ethics, which are perhaps of more immediate importance and relevance than the arguably rather artificial Trolley Problem, and at the time of writing, these issues are being keenly debated. Every technology company, it seems, wants to demonstrate that their AI is more

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an AI system, not with the system itself. Moral Machine An online experiment in which users were asked what choices should be made in various Trolley Problems. multi-agent systems Systems in which multiple agents interact with one another. multi-layer perceptron An early form of a layered neural net. MYCIN A

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the association. To do this, the program is typically trained by giving it examples of inputs and the desired corresponding outputs. See also supervised learning. Trolley Problem A problem in ethical reasoning, originally posed in the 1960s: if you do nothing, five people will die, while if you act, then only one

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traverse a built-up urban environment. utilitarianism The idea that we should choose to act so as to maximize the benefit for society. In a Trolley Problem, a utilitarian would choose to kill one person in order to save five lives. See also virtue ethics. utilities A standard technique for representing preferences

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TouringMachines 139–41 Towers of Hanoi 67–72 training data 169–72, 288–9, 292 translation 204–8 transparency 258 travelling salesman problem 82–3 Trolley Problem 246–53 Trump, Donald 294 Turing, Alan 14–15, 17–19, 20, 24–6, 77–8 Turing Machines 18–19, 21 Turing test 29–38

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence

by Jacob Turner  · 29 Oct 2018  · 688pp  · 147,571 words

can successfully replace it. Otherwise, AlphaGo would have never become so much better than anyone at playing Go.103 In philosopher Philippa Foot’s famous “Trolley Problem”104 thought experiment, participants are asked what they would do if they saw a train carriage (a trolley), heading down railway tracks, towards five workmen

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trolley so that it hits the one person, or do nothing and allow the trolley to kill five.105 The most direct analogy to the Trolley Problem for AI is the programming of self-driving cars.106 For instance: if a child steps into the road, should an AI car hit that

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be tweaked endlessly, but the basic choice is the same—which of two (or more) unpleasant or imperfect outcomes should be chosen? Aspects of the Trolley Problem are by no means unique to autonomous vehicles. For instance, whenever a passenger gets into a taxi, they delegate such decisions to the driver. Moreover

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the enemy is surrounded by civilians, taking the risk of causing collateral damage in order to eliminate the target.112 A common objection to the Trolley Problem or its variants being applied to AI is to say that humans are very rarely faced with extreme situations where they must choose between, for

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objection confuses the individual example with the underlying philosophical dilemma. Moral dilemmas do not arise only in life and death situations. To this extent, the Trolley Problem is misleading in that it could encourage people to think that AI’s moral choices are serious, but rarely arise. In fact, all decisions involving

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Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978) (the article originally appeared in the Oxford Review, Number 5, 1967). 105See Judith Jarvis Thompson, “The Trolley Problem”, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 94, No. 6 (May, 1985), 1395–1415. 106In this book, the terms “self-driving” and “autonomous” when used in relation to

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use, when to overtake and so on. Autonomy type (i) does not tend to occur at present. Autonomy types (ii) and (iii) do, however. The Trolley Problem dilemma operates most vividly within problem (iii), although as explained below, certain “moral” trade-offs may be involved in deciding how to route a journey

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Internet, contains features which would qualify as AI within this book’s definition. See, for example, Joel Achenbach, “Driverless Cars Are Colliding with the Creepy Trolley Problem”, Washington Post, 29 December 2015, https://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​news/​innovations/​wp/​2015/​12/​29/​will-self-driving-cars-ever-solve-the-famous-and-creepy

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-trolley-problem/​?​utm_​term=​.​30f91abdad96, accessed 1 June 2018; Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan, “The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles”, Cornell University Library Working

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of Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of Automobile Engineering, Vol. 226, No. 1 (2012), 70–84. 109Many commentators have pointed out the applicability of the Trolley Problem to self-driving cars, but beyond articulating the issue, few have actually suggested a legal or moral answer. See, for example, Matt Simon, “To Make

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equally so to attempt to do the same for each application of AI. Secondly, AI raises various novel questions which apply across different industries. The Trolley Problem (discussed in Chapter 2 at Section 3.1) might apply equally to AI vehicles travelling by air as by land. Should a passenger’s life

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outside observer, you judge which outcome you think is more acceptable”. In other words, the simulator is a practical example of various iterations of the Trolley Problem described in previous chapters. The Moral Machine project has been successful in gathering responses from a wide range of participants: by the end of 2017

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comprehensive analysis to date of the ethical challenges raised by AI.110 The White Paper highlights emergent ethical issues in AI including privacy,111 the Trolley Problem,112 algorithmic bias,113 transparency 114 and liability for harm caused by AI.115 In terms of AI safety, the White Paper explains that:Because

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Strong AI. See General AI Subsidiarity Superintelligence Symbolic AI T TD-gammon Teleological Principle TenCent TensorFlow Transhumanism. See Posthumanism Transparency See alsoExplanation, Black Box Problem Trolley Problem Turing Test U UAE, The UK, The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) sandbox Uncanny Valley The US US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

by Jamie Raskin  · 4 Jan 2022  · 450pp  · 144,939 words

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

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