Drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability: Raw data and source data for Figs. 2–4, Table 1 and Supplementary Fig. 1 are available at https://bit.ly/2kzLymHCode availability: Code used to produce figures and tables in this article is available at https://bit.ly/2kzLymHWhen an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hear about it? Here, we asked human participants to consider hypothetical cases in which a pedestrian was killed by a car operated under shared control of a primary and a secondary driver, and to indicate how blame should be allocated. We find that when only one driver makes an error, that driver is blamed more, regardless of whether that driver is a machine or a human. However, when both drivers make errors in cases of human-machine shared-control vehicles, the blame attributed to the machine is reduced. This finding portends a public under-reaction to the malfunctioning AI components of automated cars and therefore has a direct policy implication: allowing the de-facto standards for shared-control vehicles to be established in courts by the jury system could fail to properly regulate the safety of those vehicles; instead, a top-down scheme (through federal laws) may be called for.Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence FundANR-Labex Institute for Advanced Study in ToulouseANR-3IA Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse InstituteANR17-EURE-0010 Investissements d’Aven