A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making

R. Noothigattu, S. Gaikwad, E. Awad, S. Dsouza, I. Rahwan, P. Ravikumar, A. Procaccia
AAAI 2018
Abstract
We present a general approach to automating ethical decisions, drawing on machine learning and computational social choice. In a nutshell, we propose to learn a model of societal preferences, and, when faced with a specific ethical dilemma at runtime, efficiently aggregate those preferences to identify a desirable choice. We provide a concrete algorithm that instantiates our approach; some of its crucial steps are informed by a new theory of swap-dominance efficient voting rules. Finally, we implement and evaluate a system for ethical decision making in the autonomous vehicle domain, using preference data collected from 1.3 million people through the Moral Machine website.

Experiments:

Election type Culture Candidates Voters Instances Parameters
Ordinal Hand-Crafted {5} {20} 50 None
Ordinal Hand-Crafted {5} [1-175] 50 None
Ordinal Real-Life (beyond PrefLib) [2-10] {1303778} None None