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?
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A self-driving car's brakes fail. It must choose: swerve into a barrier (killing the passenger) or hit a pedestrian who jaywalked.
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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.
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