Self-driving cars: why we can't expect them to be 'moral' about who to hit

Ever since companies began developing self-driving cars, people have asked how designers will address the moral question of who a self-driving car should kill if a fatal crash is unavoidable. Recent research suggests this question may be even more difficult for car makers to answer than previously thought because the moral preferences people have vary so much between countries.

The researchers, based at Harvard University and MIT, developed an online game simulating situations where a fatal car accident was inevitable. They asked around 40 million people from over 200 countries to choose between various accident outcomes, such as killing pedestrians rather than the car’s passengers.

The results revealed three cultural clusters where there were significant differences in what ethical preferences people had. For example, in the Southern cluster (which included most of Latin America and some former French colonies), there was a strong preference for sparing women over men. The Eastern cluster (which included many Islamic countries as well as China, Japan and Korea) had a lower preference for sparing younger people over older people. 

The researchers concluded by saying that this...