Self-Driving Cars Will Get Ethics Lessons in Virtual Reality
...one of the best known studies, conducted at MIT in 2015, found that people wanted self-driving cars to make utilitarian decisions that would minimize death toll even if it sacrificed the car's occupants, so long as they weren't personally occupying the car.
Now, a team of German researchers have put test subjects into virtual reality and had them make split-second decisions between crashing into adults, children, animals, and inanimate objects to see if understanding the way we make tough decisions in a simulated environment will help build a model of human behavior in the real world.
In the study, published last week in Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, volunteers put on an Oculus Rift headset that simulated driving a vehicle down a suburban street. In front of the car, a pair of obstacles—sometimes people or animals, sometimes inanimate objects—would appear in two lanes, and the subject had to steer the vehicle into one of them, sacrificing it to preserve the other. (Human characters were mostly static to avoid suggesting they would move out of the way.) After multiple test runs with more than a hundred subjects, the researchers put together a hierarchy of how things were valued in relation to one another. The results were mostly unsurprising: Drivers would save a human rather than an animal, and run over an adult rather than a child.
But according to the study's authors, the specific results are less important than assessing the general suitability of VR for testing ethical scenarios.
But when algorithms do start to make decisions in life-or-death situations, designing for transparency and accountability is an important value in itself.
See the full story here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3d7dk/self-driving-cars-will-get-ethics-lessons-in-virtual-reality