An autonomous vehicle is carrying its passenger straight towards a group of pedestrians. It can either hit and kill the pedestrians, or swerve into a wall and kill its own passenger. What should it do?
The (hopefully obvious) moral choice would be for the car to sacrifice its own passenger to save the greater number of people; it’s for the greater good. A new study published in Science found that most respondents approve of such a “utilitarian” autonomous vehicle, at least in theory. The thing is, when their own life is in the balance, those same people would rather buy an autonomous vehicle that saves the passenger.
