There is an old thought experiment called the Trolley Problem that’s become central to the development of autonomous cars. In the context of self-driving cars, it sets up a scenario where an ...

Recently, the “trolley problem,” a decades-old thought experiment in moral philosophy, has been enjoying a second career of sorts, appearing in nightmare visions of a future in which cars make ...

The variations replace the victims, the switch operator, the trolley, or any combination of those with other characters or ideas. Some of them do away with the junction altogether: The meme was taken ...

Picture the following situation: You are taking a freshman-level philosophy class in college, and your professor has just asked you to imagine a runaway trolley barreling down a track toward a group ...

Should the driver of a crashing car be allowed to swerve into your lane and kill you, if she calculates that doing so would save her life? What if she'd die, too, but would save the lives of a ...

The trolley problem is a staple of discussions about ethics. The basic version is very simple: A trolley is barreling down a track toward a group of five people who remain blissfully unaware of their ...

AI is proving that it can do more than just take people’s jobs and contribute to global warming. It’s also capable of solving complicated ethical hypotheticals — and getting a laugh. In the video ...

I imagine you’re all familiar with the concept of the Trolley Problem. You know the ethics-minefield thought experiment, right? A trolley barrels down railway tracks, hurtling towards five people. You ...