The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral?

Get the inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars.

Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to ...