Produced by Iyad Rahwan’s lab at MIT, the Moral Machine is an interactive Website that asks people to decide what an autonomous car should do when faced with an ethical dilemma about who should be harmed in an unavoidable accident. Should the vehicle prioritize one child over two adults? Should it prioritize pedestrians or passengers? What if the pedestrians were crossing a red light? These dilemmas confront us with the fact that machines will have to embody moral values, and that these values vary across people and cultures. The project went viral, and attracted millions of people worldwide, garnering over 100 million crowdsourced decisions. As an interactive art project, the Moral Machine confronts the viewer with the necessity and difficulty of embedding human values into intelligent machines, and raises questions about whether morality can even be codified.

For the scientific work and publications, see the Moral Machine’s science project page.

Selected media: The New Yorker, Washington Post, The Economist, BBC, Nature News, Fast Company, Motherboard / Vice, Business Insider, The Guardian, Scientific American, WIRED, The Verge, Spiegel, Le Monde, Prospect, The Atlantic

Team: Iyad Rahwan, Jean-Francois Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Paiju Chang

Exhibits:

• Science Museum, London, Moral Machine, at “Driverless: Who is in control?” exhibition, 2019

• MIT Museum, Moral Machine, 2017-2018

• Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Moral Machine kiosk @ ‘The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility’ exhibition, 2018-2019

• Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Moral Machine, the world’s biggest computer museum, 2018

• San Francisco Exploratorium, Moral Machine kiosk at the, 2017