Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

In today's episode, we're going to see where the rubber hits the road in moral philosophy.

And I mean that quite literally. You've all heard about self-driving cars,

and you may have heard about the idea that self-driving cars are going to have to solve the trolley problem.

This famous thought experiment in philosophy where you can either continue to do something,

and several people will die, or you can take an action to prevent your current course of action,

and do something different, and fewer people will die. Is it okay to intentionally kill a smaller

number of people to save a larger number of people? You might not think that this is something you

are going to need to deal with, but it's simply an illustration of the kinds of problems that all

sorts of robots and artificial intelligences are going to have to deal with. They're going to need

to make choices, and in the extreme examples, they're going to need to make hard choices about how

to cause the least harm. As one example, should a self-driving car, if there are two bicyclists in the

way, and it judges that it's going to have to hit one of them, should the self-driving car target

a bicyclist with a helmet, rather than one without, on the theory that wearing a helmet makes that

bicyclist more safe, and therefore in some sense that person should get punished for wearing the

helmet that doesn't seem right. These are moral intuitions that lead to really hard problems,

and we have to face up to them. Today's guest, Derek Lieben, is a philosopher who has written a new

book called Ethics for Robots, where he tackles exactly these questions, not just self-driving cars,

but the general idea of what kind of moral decision processes should we program into our artificial

intelligences? I think it's just a fascinating topic to think about, because on the one hand,

Derek's book involves big ideas from moral philosophy, utilitarianism versus deontology,

John Roles' theory of justice, things like that. On the other hand, very down to earth questions

...