(Photo credits: goodadvise.com) The Trolley Problem. One of the most mind-shattering dilemmas. It was a modern scenario constructed by philosopher Philippa Foot. The concept is simple; a train is headed towards a splitting track, towards a group of 5 people tied to the railway tracks on one track and towards a single person tied to the tracks as well on the other. Now you are a witness, having a fixed amount of time to decide if to pull the switch for the train to run over either one of the tracks of your choice. The image below represents the scenario. It is an extremely morbid scenario but it did prove useful in proving the hypothesis of people choosing to save more lives. A large proportion of people, approximately 90% of the people, chose to save the 5 people over the single person, proving the hypothesis. (Photo credit: Wikiwand) Now we have a second scenario, devised by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. In this second scenario, You are on a bridge going across the railway together with a large sized person that you know will be able to stop the train if you push him off. The train is now heading towards a group of 5 people tied to the railway and impeding doom is in just a moment. This is known as the fat man problem. What would you do? Surveys shown that many choose to let the 5 people die, unlike in the hypothesis and result of the previous problem. It was deduced that the physical act of pushing the person off the bridge could have instilled feelings of guilt and compassion, indicating that emotions may play a large role in day to day decisions as well as the influence of emotions may play a bigger role than logical thinking or previously learnt concepts. The scenario is depicted below. Photo credits: skeptic.com) Such concepts are important in deciding the decisions to be made by artificial intelligence (AI) in the future as AI becomes more and more prevalent in our society. These concepts will prove to be invaluable in scenarios such as unavoidable accidents and emergency scenarios. A simple game reacted by MIT has been used go collect survey results of how driver-less vehicles should react in these scenarios. You can check out the project here and contribute to the survey here -> moralmachine.mit.edu
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