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Automating Morality: Ethics for Intelligent Machines
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Reference: HBS-324007-E
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Year: 2023
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Number of pages: 14
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Geographic Setting: Africa;Asia;Australia and Oceania;Central America and Caribbean;Europe;North America;South America
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Publication Date: Aug 30, 2023
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Fecha de edición: Dec 11, 2023
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Source: HBSP (USA)
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Type of Document: Case
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Industry Setting: Automotive industry;Information technology industry
Description
As autonomy became a more significant part of modern life - most notably in autonomous vehicles (AVs), such as Teslas - ethical debates about whether and how to impart ethics to machines heated up. Utilitarians pointed out that autonomous vehicles crashed much less often than human-driven cars, making their adoption a net positive in terms of lives saved; deontologists worried about the implications of programming a car to swerve to kill its passengers instead of pedestrians, for example, among other high-stakes "trolley problems." Ethical issues abounded across different levels of automation and across borders. How should AVs be programmed for complex, uncertain, ethically challenging situations? Was there anything innately human about moral reasoning, or could companies imbue AVs with sound ethical frameworks?