In November, three presentations based on BEHAVE-work were given to enthusiastic audiences. On November 6, the TU Delft Tracks in Transport conference hosted a special session organized by Andreia and Caspar, in which Andreia, Tom and Bing Huang presented work on the topic “On moral men and machines: Real ethical issues on the road”. In this special session highlights of recent work done in the BEHAVE project were presented, including new theoretical insights underpinned by empirical evidence on three thought-provocative questions: Can we predict aggressive driving behavior based on drivers’ moral values? Why do people find accidents caused by autonomous vehicles more unacceptable than those caused by human drivers? and What can bioethics and automotive industry reports teach us about dealing with moral issues surrounding autonomous vehicles?
On 20 November, Caspar gave a lunch lecture for the aiTech community, which brings together scholars with diverse AI-related disciplinary perspectives ranging from computer science to ethics and the behavioral sciences. Caspar’s talk, titled “Morality and taboos for men and machines”, started with a quick overview of how the BEHAVE-team integrates the newest insights from moral psychology into tractable mathematical formulations of moral choice behavior. Furthermore, it was shown how, building on such a mathematical representation of human morality, a human-inspired moral compass can be designed for a ‘morally uncertain’ Artificial Intelligence (AI).
On 28 November, as part of the so-called Dag van het Gedrag in The Hague, Tom, Maarten en Caspar co-hosted a special session on the difficulties associated with stearing human behavior through influencing moral values and attitudes. The session was oversubscribed, and participants (mostly civil servants) engaged with the speakers in a lively discussion about the pros and cons of tapping into moral values when trying to steer behavior towards more societally beneficial outcomes.
