Imagine you are driving down the street when two peopleone child and one adultstep onto the road. Hitting one of them is unavoidable. You have a terrible choice. What do you do?

Now imagine that the car is driverless. What happens then? Should the car decide?

Until now, no one believed that autonomous carsrobotic vehicles that operate without human control could make moral and ethical choices, an issue that has been central to the ongoing debate about their use. But German scientists now think otherwise. They believe eventually it may be possible to introduce elements of morality and ethics into self-driving cars.

To be sure, most human drivers will never face such an agonizing dilemma. Nevertheless, with many millions of cars on the road, these situations do occur occasionally, said Leon Stfeld, a researcher in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrck and lead author of a new study modeling ethics for self-driving cars. The paper, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, was co-authored by Gordon Pipa, Peter Knig, and Richard Gast, all of the institute.

The concept of driverless cars has grown in popularity as a way to combat climate change, since these autonomous vehicles drive more efficiently than most humans. They avoid rapid acceleration and braking, two habits that waste fuel. Also, a fleet of self-driving cars could travel close together on the highway to cut down on drag, thereby saving fuel. Driverless cars will also encourage car-sharing, reducing the number of cars on the road and possibly making private car ownership unnecessary.

Improved safety is also an energy saver. [Driverless cars] are expected to cause fewer accidents, which means fewer cars need to be produced to replace the crashed ones, providing another energy savings, Stfeld said. The technology could help [fight climate change] in many ways.

The study suggests that cars can be programmed to model human moral behaviors involving choice, deciding which of multiple possible collisions would be the best option. Scientists placed human subjects into immersive virtual reality settings to study behavior in simulated traffic scenarios. They then used the data to design algorithms for driverless cars that could enable them to cope with potentially tragic predicaments on the road just as humans would.

Participants drove a car in a typical suburban neighborhood on a foggy day when they suddenly faced collision with an animal, humans or an inanimate object, such as a trash can, and had to decide what or whom to spare. For example, adult or child? Human or animal? Dog or other animal? In the study, children fared better than adults. The dog was the most valued animal, the others being a goat, deer and boar.

When it comes to humans versus animals, most people would certainly agree that the well-being of humans must be the first priority, Stfeld said. But from the perspective of the self-driving car, everything is probabilistic. Most situations arent as clear cut as should I kill the dog, or the human? It is more likely should I kill the dog with near certainty, or alternatively spare the dog but take a 5 percent chance of a minor injury to a human? Adhering to strict rules, such as always deciding in favor of the human, might just not feel right for many.

Other variables also come into play. For example, was the person at fault? Did the adult look for cars before stepping into the street? Did the child chase a ball into the street without stopping to think? Also, how many people are in harms way?

The German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure attempted to answer these questions in a recent report. It defined 20 ethical principles for self-driving cars, several of which stand at odds with the choices humans made in Stfelds experiment. For example, the ministrys report says that a child who runs onto the road is more to blameand less worthy of savingthan an adult standing on the footpath as a non-involved party. Moreover, it declares it unacceptable to take a potential victims age into account.

Most peopleat least in Europe and very likely also Northern American cultureswould save a child over an adult or elderly person, Stfeld said. We could debate whether or not we want cars to behave like humans, or whether we want them to comply to categorical rules such as the ones provided by the ethics committee report.

Peter Knig, a study co-author, believes their research creates more quandaries than it solves, as sometimes happens in science. Now that we know how to implement human ethical decisions into machines we, as a society, are still left with a double dilemma, he said. Firstly, we have to decide whether moral values should be included in guidelines for machine behavior and secondly, if they are, should machines should act just like humans?

The study doesnt seek to answer these questions, only to demonstrate that it is possible to model ethical and moral decision-making in driverless cars, using clues as to how humans would act. The authors are trying to lay the groundwork for additional studies and further debate.

It would be rather simple to implement, as technology certainly isnt the limiting factor here, Stfeld said. The question is how we as a society want the cars to handle this kind of situation, and how the laws should be written. What should be allowed and what shouldnt? In order to come to an informed opinion, its certainly very useful to know how humans actually do behave when theyre facing such a decision.

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

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What moral code should your self-driving car follow? - Popular Science

Interactions between gut bacteria and the brain may play an important role in human health and behavior.

In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have discovered that microbiota in the gut interacts with brain regions associated with mood and behavior in healthy humans.The findings add to the growing body of evidence of a significant link between the gut and the brain.

Earlier studies have shown that microbiota, a community of microorganisms in the gut, can influence behavior and emotion. Rodent models have demonstrated the effects of gut microbiota on emotional and social behaviors, such as anxiety and depression, but there has been little scientific evidence in humans.

For the new study, the researchers wanted to identify brain and behavioral characteristics of healthy women clustered by gut microbiota profiles. A total of 40 women gave fecal samples for profiling, and magnetic resonance images were taken of their brains as they looked at images of individuals, activities, or other objects that evoked an emotional response.

The women were divided by their gut bacteria composition into two groups: 33 had more of a bacterium called Bacteroides; the remaining seven had more of the Prevotella bacteria.

Women in the Bacteroides group showed greater thickness of the gray matter in the frontal cortex and insula, brain regions involved with complex processing of information. These women also had larger volumes of the hippocampus, a region involved in memory processing.

In contrast, women in the Prevotella group displayed more connections between emotional, attentional and sensory brain regions and lower brain volumes in several regions, such as the hippocampus.

In this group, the womens hippocampus was less active as they looked at negative images. They also rated higher levels of negative feelings such as anxiety, distress and irritability after looking at photos with negative images than did the women in the Bacteroides group.

The new findings support the concept of brain-gut-microbiota interactions in healthy humans. Researchers still do not fully understand whether the bacteria in the gut influence the development of the brain and its activity when unpleasant emotional content is encountered, or if existing differences in the brain influence the type of bacteria that reside in the gut.

In either case, however, the findings could lead to important changes in how we perceive human emotions.

Source: University of California, Los Angeles Health Sciences

APA Reference Pedersen, T. (2017). Gut Bacteria May Be Linked to Mood, Behavior in Healthy Humans. Psych Central. Retrieved on July 5, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/07/05/gut-bacteria-may-be-linked-to-mood-behavior-in-healthy-humans/122846.html

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Gut Bacteria May Be Linked to Mood, Behavior in Healthy Humans - PsychCentral.com

FILE In this Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, file photo, an Uber driverless car waits in traffic during a test drive in San Francisco. In just a few years, well-mannered self-driving robotaxis will share the roads with reckless, law-breaking human drivers. The prospect is causing migraines for the people developing the robocars and is slowing their development. But experts say eventually the cars will coexist with human drivers on real roads. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

(CN) Is a self-driving vehicle capable of making moral decisions? If it is, which moral values should it use to make such choices?

These questions are among the issues society must consider as artificial intelligence, or AI, systems become more common in various industries, according to Gordon Pipa, co-author of a new study that provides a statistical model of human morality.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, is a breakthrough for efforts to equip AI systems with morality which experts had viewed as context-based and therefore impossible to describe mathematically.

But we found quite the opposite, said lead author Leon Sutfeld, a researcher at the University of Osnabruck in Germany. Human behavior in dilemma situations can be modeled by a rather simple value-of-life-based model that is attributed by the participant to every human, animal, or inanimate object.

In order to examine human behavior in road traffic scenarios, the team asked study participants to drive a car in a simulated, virtual-reality suburban neighborhood where they experienced unexpected, unavoidable dilemmas involving animals, inanimate objects and humans forcing the participants to prioritize which to save.

The authors then used the results to conceptualize statistical models that established rules, along with an associated degree of explanatory power to understand the observed behavior.

The findings come amid growing debate over the behavior of self-driving vehicles and other machines in unavoidable accidents.

Stakeholders and experts have operated under the assumption that human moral behavior could not be modeled, and have focused on outlining critical variables for engineering AIsystems. For example, a new initiative from the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, or BMVI, has defined 20 ethical principles for self-driving cars.

Now that applying human morality to machines seems to be possible, the team argues that debate should now focus on how such morals are programmed into, and employed by, AI.

Now that we know how to implement human ethical decisions into machines we, as a society, are still left with a double dilemma, said senior author Peter Konig, a professor at the University of Osnabruck. Firstly, we have to decide whether moral values should be included in guidelines for machine behavior and secondly, if they are, should machinesact just like humans.

The team also warns that society is at the beginning of a technological revolution that requires clear rules. Without them, machines could begin making decisions without us.

In conclusion, Papa wonders: Should they imitate moral behavior by imitating human decisions, should they behave along ethical theories and if so, which ones and critically, if things go wrong who or what is at fault?

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Driverless Cars Could Learn to Make Moral Choices - Courthouse News Service

Psychopaths, with their superficial charms but lack of empathy, may act the way they do because their brains are wired to overvalue immediate rewards, a new study finds.

Psychopaths' brain wiring may also lead them to avoid thinking about the consequences of their potentially immoral actions, the study found.

Psychopaths are thought to make up about 1 percent of the general population and up to 25 percent of the prison population. Scientists who investigate psychopathy commonly define people with the disorder as having a lack of conscience or remorse, as well as impulsivity or a lack of self-control, shallow experiences of emotions, superficial charm and a grandiose sense of their own worth. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

More than three-quarters of incarcerated psychopaths are in prison because of a violent offense, according to a 2011 review of studies. Although not all psychopaths are violent, they can prove socially destructive in other ways, by lying, cheating and stealing, that review added.

"Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole," Joshua Buckholtz, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Harvard University, said in a statement.

Scientific research into psychopathy "has for many years focused on emotion in particular, this idea that psychopaths are cold-blooded super-predators who lack the ability to experience emotions," Buckholtz told Live Science. In the new study, the researchers wanted to focus more on psychopaths' behaviors.

"Regardless of what they feel, they engage in a lot of behavior marked by a lack of self-control, and we were interested in the neuroscience of that poor decision making," he said.

Buckholtz and his colleagues brought a mobile MRI scanner on a tractor trailer to a pair of medium-security prisons in Wisconsin. They scanned the brains of 49 inmates as the prisoners took part in a delayed gratification test that asked them to choose between two options receiving a smaller amount of money immediately or a larger amount later. The researchers also had the inmates take a test to assess their level of psychopathy.

The researchers found that inmates who scored high for psychopathy showed greater activity in a brain region called the ventral striatum for the more immediate choice than those who scored lower in psychopathy. Previous studies suggested that the ventral striatum is linked with the ability to evaluate the value of different choices.

In addition, the scientists found that in psychopaths, the connection between the ventral striatum and another brain region known as the ventral medial prefrontal cortex were much weaker than normal. Prior work suggested that the ventral medial prefrontal cortex "is important for 'mental time travel' that is, thinking about the future consequences of actions," Buckholtz said. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

These findings suggest that psychopaths often behave antisocially because their brains are wired in a way that makes them both overvalue immediate rewards and neglect the future costs of potentially immoral actions. In fact, the more abnormal inmates' brains were in both of these regards, the more crimes the prisoners were convicted of.

"The pattern of decision making we see in psychopathic individuals is not all that different from that in people with other kinds of self-destructive behavior, such as substance abusers, compulsive over-eaters or compulsive gamblers," Buckholtz said. "Whatever else may be going in psychopathy, such as deficits of emotion, our findings put psychopathy in the sphere of things that can be intervened in."

Future research can investigate whether there may be ways to help psychopaths improve their thinking about the future, such as through behavioral therapies or noninvasive brain stimulation, Buckholtz said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (July 5) in the journal Neuron.

Original article on Live Science.

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Psychopaths' Brains Reveal Secrets of Their Immoral Behavior - Live Science