Researchers from the Toulouse School of Economics decided to see what the public would decide, and posed a series of questions to online survey-takers, including a situation where a car would either kill 10 people and save the driver, or swerve and kill the driver to save the group.
They found that more than 75 percent supported self-sacrifice of the passenger to save 10 people, and around 50 percent supported self-sacrifice when saving just one person. However, respondents didn’t actually think real cars would end up being programmed this way, and would probably save the passenger at all costs.
The questions were answered by paid participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (compensated to the tune of 25 cents for their time), and in total 913 participants took three surveys with different questions. Since it was an online survey, the participants could have been from anywhere in the world.
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