This work is being continued through The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.
Adoption of self-driving, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promises to dramatically reduce the number of traffic accidents, but some inevitable accidents will require AVs to choose the lesser of two evils, such as running over a pedestrian on the road or the sidewalk. Defining the algorithms to guide AVs confronted with such moral dilemmas is a challenge, and manufacturers and regulators will need psychologists to apply methods of experimental ethics to these situations.