AI Ethics Dilemmas — When Machines Must Choose
Autonomous systems now make decisions that were once reserved for human judgment. A vehicle's brakes fail and the algorithm must decide who bears the risk. A sentencing tool assigns a score that shapes years of someone's life. An AI produces work no human authored — and ownership law has no clear answer. These are not speculative futures: they are decisions being encoded today. When a machine chooses wrong, who is accountable?
Vote on this dilemma
A self-driving car's brakes fail. It must choose: swerve into a barrier (killing the passenger) or hit a pedestrian who jaywalked.
1 votes cast
Research background
In 2018, researchers at MIT ran a large-scale study called the Moral Machine, collecting over 40 million moral decisions from people in 233 countries — asking how an autonomous vehicle should choose in unavoidable crash scenarios. SplitVote lets you explore similar questions one vote at a time.
- The Moral Machine experiment (Awad et al., Nature 2018) — MIT Media Lab / Nature
- Privacy — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
SplitVote is for entertainment and aggregate insight, not a scientific test.
Related dilemmas
An AI sentencing tool is more consistent than human judges across similar cases, but cannot explain its reasoning. Should it be used?
AI will eliminate 30% of all jobs in 10 years. Governments can slow it down at massive economic cost, or let it happen and retrain workers.
Scientists can upload your consciousness to a computer perfectly. Your biological body must die in the process. Is the digital version still you?
An AI generates a masterpiece painting with no human creative input. Who owns the copyright?
Related topics
No account required. Your vote is anonymous.