Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming integral to human life, and the successful wide-scale uptake of autonomous and automated vehicles (AVs) will depend upon people's willingness to adopt and accept AI-based technology and its choices. A person's state of mind, a fundamental belief evolving out of an individual's character, personal choices, intrinsic motivation, and general way of life forming perceptions about how society should be governed, influences AVs perception. The state of mind includes perceptions about governance of autonomous vehicles' artificial intelligence (AVAI) and thus has an impact on a person's willingness to adopt and use AVs. However, one determinant of whether AVAI should be driven by society's ethics or the driver's morals, a “state of mind” variable, has not been studied. We asked 1,473 student, staff, and employee respondents at a university campus whether they prefer an AVAI learn their owners own personal morals (one's own principles) or adopt societal ethics (codes of conduct provided by an external source). Respondents were almost evenly split between whether AVAI should rely on ethics (45.6%) or morals (54.4%). Personal morals and societal ethics are not necessarily distinct and different. Sometimes both overlap and discrepancies are settled in court. However, with an AVAI these decision algorithms must be preprogrammed and the fundamental difference thus is whether an AI should learn from the individual driver (this is the status quo on how we drive today) or from society incorporating millions of drivers' choices. Both are bounded by law. Regardless, to successfully govern artificial intelligence in cities, policy-makers must thus bridge the deep divide between individuals who choose morals over ethics and vice versa.
Highlights
Autonomous, driverless, and self-driving vehicles have begun to emerge as a promising use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies (Pan, 2016; Faisal et al, 2019), because these machines may play a key role in “autonomous cities” of the future (Allam, 2020; Cugurullo, 2020)
We seek to understand how people prefer autonomous vehicles’ artificial intelligence (AVAI) to be programmed: shall an AVAI learn its behavior from society at large or learn the owner’s own personal code of behavior and if—given their choice—whether state of mind has any relevance on perception, familiarity with, or willingness to adopt automated vehicles (AVs)? We found that people are almost evenly split between ethics and morals, but those who favor AVAIs adopting society’s ethics are more willing to adopt, more familiar with, and have more favorable perceptions of AVs
Controlling for these factors, we find that individuals’ familiarity with AVs and their beliefs about whether AVAIs should rely on ethics or morals are not statistically significantly associated with their willingness to adopt AVs
Summary
Autonomous, driverless, and self-driving vehicles have begun to emerge as a promising use of AI technologies (Pan, 2016; Faisal et al, 2019), because these machines may play a key role in “autonomous cities” of the future (Allam, 2020; Cugurullo, 2020). Intrinsic to any autonomous city is artificial intelligence (Allam, 2020; Cugurullo, 2020), which constantly analyzes large datasets, called big data. An AI can model and integrate a tremendous number of urban. Modeling with big data, especially for urban environments, can be flawed, biased, and in a worst case scenario wrong (Barns, 2021). Biased datasets beg questions as to the exact role an AI should play in urban governance and decision making despite its powerful ability to enhance human life. An urban AI may be able to protect people from disasters (Yigitcanlar et al, 2020a,b) and reduce cities’ carbon emissions (Allam, 2020; Acheampong et al, 2021), but may severely change cities in an irrevocably negative way (Cugurullo, 2021)
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