https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survey-polls-the-world-should-a-self-driving-car-save-passengers-or-kids-in-the-road/ > In 2014 the driver of a truck lost his brakes on a hill in Ithaca, N.Y., and had to decide between running over construction workers and plowing into a café. The man chose the latter, and a bartender died. It was a real-life case of one of moral philosophers’ favorite thought experiments: the trolley problem.  In their book Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, Columbia University professor Hod Lipson and technology journalist Melba Kurman offer it as an example of the awful dilemmas that designers of self-driving cars must prepare for. > Today a team led by Edmond Awad, a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, has released the results of its online gamefied version of the dilemma, the “Moral Machine” experiment. Some 2.3 million volunteers across the world played out nearly 40 million scenarios, passing judgment on who should live and who should die in accidents involving a runaway self-driving car. (The results of this crowdsourcing experiment were reported October 24 in Nature.)