The Ethical Dilemmas of Self-Driving Cars

Speaker: Azim Shariff, associate professor of psychology

With the rapid approach of self-driving cars, we are poised to yield autonomy to millions of machines that will have the power over life and death. The road to this future has a bright promise, but as we are beginning to see, there are numerous psychological roadblocks. Many of these involve thorny ethical challenges that come when the moral decisions that are today made by individual drivers are turned over to preprogrammed algorithms. How should these cars be programmed to mete out risks to the various people on road? Who determines the ethics of these algorithms? Shariff will discuss the recent work with his collaborators on the social psychology of these moral machines. 

Shariff is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Moral Psychology. His work has appeared in scholarly journals and he’s discussed this work in fancy popular press outlets and at fancy science festivals. He teaches a free Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on "The Science of Religion" for the public through edX.