Ethical Dilemmas May Not Be the Best Way to Explore Designing Better AI.

In 2014, MIT created the Moral Machine. It’s a webpage that showcases various ethical scenarios a self-driving car will never encounter. It asks people to decide what the car should do in each scenario. The scenarios involve moral choices such as deciding whether to hit one pedestrian and avoid hitting a group of people or plow into a group of street children to avoid hitting someone. People writing in Nature recently turned this AI allegory into a “study,” by analyzing the results of bored people on the Internet judging the car’s…