Iyad Rahwan

Moral Machine is an online platform that generates ethical dilemma scenarios faced by hypothetical autonomous machines, allowing visitors to assess the scenarios and vote on the most morally acceptable between two unavoidable harm outcomes. The presented scenarios are often variations of the trolley problem. As of December 2017, the platform has collected 40 million decisions from millions of visitors from 233 countries and territories. Analysis of the data showed broad differences in relative preferences among different countries, and correlations between these preferences and various national metrics .

Rahwan is one of the first to consider the problem of self autonomous vehicles as an ethical dilemma. His 2016 paper, The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles, showed that people approved of utilitarian autonomous vehicles, and wanted others to purchase these vehicles, but they themselves would prefer to ride in an autonomous vehicle that protected its passenger at all costs, and would not use self-driving vehicles if utilitarianism was imposed on them by law. Thus the paper concludes the regulation of utilitarian algorithms could paradoxically increase casualties by driving by inadvertently postponing the adoption of a safer technology. The paper spurred lots of coverage about the role of ethics in the creation of artificially intelligent driving systems.

Rahwan led the winning team in the 2012 US State Department Tag Challenge, using crowdsourcing and a referral-incentivizing reward mechanism (similar to the one used in the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge) to locate individuals in European and American cities within 12 hours each, given only their photographic portraits.

Rahwan was born in Aleppo, Syria. He earned an Information Systems PhD in 2005 from the University of Melbourne. As an assistant and then associate professor in Computing and Information Science at MIT-partnered Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Rahwan investigated scalable social mobilization's possibilities, limits, and challenges in various contexts by analyzing data from the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, the DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011, and the 2012 US State Department Tag Challenge. In 2015, Rahwan started the Scalable Cooperation Group at the MIT Media Lab, where he is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, as well as an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society. Since 2019 Rahwan is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and directs the Center for Humans and Machines.