AI Lunch and Seminar

Iyad Rahwan - The Psychological Dilemmas of Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles promise to revolutionize transportation and substantially improve safety. But they also made salient an ethical question: how should an algorithm decide relative risk in situations of unavoidable harm? I present a series of psychological studies that explore how people think about such scenarios, and discuss the regulatory challenges these studies reveal. I also describe a crowdsourcing effort that engaged millions of people worldwide with the ethical questions facing car makers and regulators.

Bio: Iyad Rahwan is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Scalable Cooperation group. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of Artificial Intelligence.