People are averse to machines making moral decisions.

By Yochanan E. Bigman, Kurt Gray. 2018

522 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Do people want autonomous machines making moral decisions? Nine studies suggest that that the answer is 'no'-in part because machines lack a complete mind. Studies 1-6 find that people are averse to machines making morally-relevant driving, legal, medical, and military decisions, and that this aversion is mediated by the perception that machines can neither fully think nor feel. Studies 5-6 find that this aversion exists even when moral decisions have positive outcomes. Studies 7-9 briefly investigate three potential routes to increasing the acceptability of machine moral decision-making: limiting the machine to an advisory role (Study 7), increasing machines' perceived experience (Study 8), and increasing machines' perceived expertise (Study 9). Although some of these routes show promise, the aversion to machine moral decision-making is difficult to eliminate. This aversion may prove challenging for the integration of autonomous technology in moral domains including medicine, the law, the military, and self-driving vehicles.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

To Err Is Human(-oid): How Do Consumers React to Robot Service Failure and Recovery? (2020, background): “…perceptions of machines are closely related to anthropomorphism (Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007), such that humanlike features (e.g., a face, arms, and a voice) lead people to attribute minds to machines and humanize them (Bigman and Gray 2018; Broadbent et al. 2013; Schroeder and Epley 2016).”
Artificial intelligence versus Maya Angelou: Experimental evidence that people cannot differentiate AI-generated from human-written poetry (2020, background): “For example, people dislike, machines making moral decisions (Bigman & Gray, 2018), especially when they appear eerily human (Laakasuo, Palom ¨ aki, & K ¨ obis, 2020), devalue purely algorithmic political choices (Starke & Lünich, 2020), and are even reluctant to rely on superior algorithmic…”
The 3 C's of anthropomorphism: Connection, comprehension, and competition (2019, background): “Artificial minds are further perceived to lack the human ability to experience pain and pleasure (Gray et al., 2007), and therefore cannot be trusted to make moral decisions (Bigman & Gray, 2018).”