Person:

Levine, Sydney

When an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hearabout it? Here, we asked human participants to consider hypothetical cases inwhich a pedestrian was killed by a car operated under shared control of a primaryand a secondary driver, and to indicate how blame should be allocated. We findthat when only one driver makes an error, that driver is blamed more, regardlessof whether that driver is a machine or a human. However, when both drivers makeerrors in cases of human-machine shared-control vehicles, the blame attributedto the machine is reduced. This finding portends a public under-reaction tothe malfunctioning AI components of automated cars and therefore has a directpolicy implication: allowing the de-facto standards for shared-control vehicles tobe established in courts by the jury system could fail to properly regulate thesafety of those vehicles; instead, a top-down scheme (through federal laws) maybe called for.