Driverless Dilemma

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Science, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2017

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It’s a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy. That’s the lesson of the classic Trolley Problem, a moral puzzle that fried our brains in an episode we did about 11 years ago. Luckily, the Trolley Problem has always been little more than a thought experiment, mostly confined to conversations at a certain kind of cocktail party. That is until now. New technologies are forcing that moral quandry out of our philosophy departments and onto our streets. So today we revisit the Trolley Problem and wonder how a two-ton hunk of speeding metal will make moral calculations about life and death that we can’t even figure out ourselves. This story was reported and produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Bethel Habte. Thanks to Iyad Rahwan, Edmond Awad and Sydney Levine from the Moral Machine group at MIT. Also thanks to Fiery Cushman, Matthew DeBord, Sertac Karaman, Martine Powers, Xin Xiang, and Roborace for all of their help. Thanks to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism students who collected the vox: Chelsea Donohue, Ivan Flores, David Gentile, Maite Hernandez, Claudia Irizarry-Aponte, Comice Johnson, Richard Loria, Nivian Malik, Avery Miles, Alexandra Semenova, Kalah Siegel, Mark Suleymanov, Andee Tagle, Shaydanay Urbani, Isvett Verde and Reece Williams. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.6	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	C.
0:14.8	See?
0:19.1	I'm Chad I boomrod.
0:20.5	I'm Robert Krollowich, and you know what this is. This radio lab. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to play you a little bit of tape first just to set up what we're going to do today. About a month ago, we were doing the thing about the fake news. Yeah, we were very worried about a lot of fake news. A lot of people are. But in the middle of doing that reporting, we were talking with a fellow from Vanity Fair.
0:38.3	My name is Nick Bilton. I'm a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. And in the course of our conversation, Nick, and this had nothing to do what we were talking about, by the way, Nick just got into a sort of a, well, he went into a kind of a nervous reverie, I'd say. Yeah, he was like, you know, you guys want to talk about fake news, but that's not actually what's eating at me.
0:56.4	The thing that I've been pretty obsessed with later... Nervous reverie, I'd say. Yeah, he was like, you know, you guys want to talk about fake news, but that's not actually what's eating at me.
0:56.4	The thing that I've been pretty obsessed with lately is actually not fake news, but it's automation and artificial intelligence and driverless cars because it's going to have a larger effect on society than any technology that I think has ever been created in the history of mankind.
1:13.9	I know that's kind of a bold statement, but...
1:15.6	Quite bold.
1:16.8	But you've got to imagine that, you know, that there will be in the next 10 years, 20 to 50 million jobs that will just vanish to automation.
1:27.2	You've got, you know, million truckers
1:29.4	that will lose their jobs. But it's not, we think about like automation and driverless cars,
1:35.4	and we think about the fact that they are going to, the people that just drive the cars,
1:42.3	like the taxi drivers and the truckers are going to lose their jobs.
	...

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