Jean-François Bonnefon

With the development of artificial intelligence came concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behavior. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Machine, an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered nearly 100 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in more than 200 countries and territories. I will describe the results of this experiment, paying special attention to cross-cultural variations in ethical preferences. I will discuss the role that these data can play to inform public policies about the programming of autonomous vehicles.

Jean-François Bonnefon (PhD, cognitive psychology) is a Research Director at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, affiliated to the Toulouse School of Economics, the Toulouse School of Management, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. He holds the Moral AI chair at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute, and was the president of the European Commission expert group on the ethics of driverless mobility. He conducts research on decisions which have a moral component, especially in the context of machine ethics and human-AI cooperation. His research appeared in 100+ academic articles, in outlets that include Science, Nature, and PNAS.