If your car was about to hit a child crossing the street, would you swerve out of the way if it meant hitting two adults on the other side of the road?
Cars kill around 2,000 people in the UK every year, and tens of thousands more across the world. Computer scientists are hard at work making cars safer, and one of the ways this might be done is by taking humans out of the driver seat - having cars drive themselves. The ethical decisions a self-driving car has to make are no different from those a human driver will face. But it is up to their programmers to work out what their responses will be.
How should the car be programmed to act when an accident is unavoidable? Should they prioritise the driver? Other drivers? Pedestrians?
Another ethical question that self-driving vehicle technology forces us to face is this: How much safer does a self-driving car have to be before it is no longer ethical to allow humans to drive at all?
As mentioned above, human drivers kill 2,000 UK citizens every year. If completely switching to self-driving cars would lower that number to just 1,990, is it ethical to force people to give up their cars and buy new ones with self-driving technology? How about if it could drop fatalities to just 1,000, or 100, or 0?
What might happen if hackers found a way to access and control self-driven cars?
To get closer to an answer - if that were ever possible - researchers from the MIT Media Lab have analysed more than 40 million responses to an experiment they launched in 2014.Their Moral Machine has revealed how attitudes differ across the world.
Click on the link below and take part in the Moral Machine. Watch the video which explains what to do then Start Judging.