1. How long did William stay at Mount Tai?
| A．One day. |
| B．Two days. |
| C．Three days. |
| A．On June 5th. |
| B．On June 6th. |
| C．On June 7th. |
| A．By car. |
| B．By plane. |
| C．By train. |
2 . When a driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road illegally, she is making a moral decision that shifts risk from the pedestrian to the people in the car. Self-driving cars might soon have to make such ethical (道德的)judgments on their own — but settling on a universal moral code for the vehicles could be a tough task, suggests a survey.
The largest ever survey of machine ethics, called the Moral Machine, laid out 13 possible situations in which someone’s death was unavoidable. Respondents were asked to choose who to spare in situations that involved a mix of variables: young or old, rich or poor, more people or fewer. Within 18 months, the online quiz had recorded 40 million decisions made by people from 233 countries and territories.
When the researchers analysed these answers, they found that the nations could be divided into three groups. One contains North America and several European nations where Christianity has been the dominant (占支配地位的)religion; another includes countries such as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, with strong Confucian or Islamic traditions. A third group consists of countries in Central and South America, such as Colombia and Brazil. The first group showed a stronger preference for sacrificing older lives to save younger ones than did the second group, for example.
The researchers also identified relationships between social and economic factors in a country. They found that people from relatively wealthy countries with strong institutions, such as Finland and Japan, more often chose to hit people who stepped into traffic illegally than did respondents in nations with weaker institutions, such as Nigeria or Pakistan.
People rarely face such moral dilemmas, and some cities question whether the possible situations posed in the online quiz are relevant to the ethical and practical questions surrounding driverless cars. But the researchers argue that the findings reveal cultural differences that governments and makers of self-driving cars must take into account if they want the vehicles to gain public acceptance.
At least Barbara Wege, who heads a group working on autonomous-vehicle ethics at Audi in Ingolstadt, Germany, says such studies are valuable. Wege argues that self-driving cars would cause fewer accidents, proportionally, than human drivers do each year—but that people might focus more on events involving robots.
Surveys such as the Moral Machine can help to begin public discussions about these unavoidable accidents that might develop trust. “We need to come up with a social consensus,” she says, “about which risks we are willing to take.”
1. Why is it difficult to set universal moral rules for programming self-driving cars?| A．Social values always change with the times. |
| B．Moral choices vary between different cultures. |
| C．Drivers have a preference for sacrificing the weak. |
| D．Car makers are faced with decisions of life or death. |
| A．using a massive online quiz worldwide |
| B．comparing different cultures and customs |
| C．dividing the respondents into three groups |
| D．performing a series of controlled experiments |
| A．Nigeria | B．Colombia |
| C．Finland | D．Indonesia |
| A．Self-driving cars will greatly improve the traffic environment |
| B．Accidents caused by self-driving cars might receive more attention |
| C．Problems involving self-driving cars might shake the public trust in society |
| D．Car makers needn’t take the risk of solving self-driving car ethical dilemmas |
