An enduring problem with self-driving cars has been how to program them to make ethical decisions in unavoidable crashes. A new study has found its actually surprisingly easy to model how humans make them, opening a potential avenue to solving the conundrum.

Ethicists have tussled with the so-called trolley problem for decades. If a runaway trolley, or tram, is about to hit a group of people, and by pulling a lever you can make it switch tracks so it hits only one person, should you pull the lever?

But for those designing self-driving cars the problem is more than just a thought experiment, as these vehicles will at times have to make similar decisions. If a pedestrian steps out into the road suddenly, the car may have to decide between swerving and potentially injuring its passengers or knocking down the pedestrian.

Previous research had shown that the moral judgements at the heart of how humans deal with these kinds of situations are highly contextual, making them hard to model and therefore replicate in machines.

But when researchers from the University of Osnabrck in Germany used immersive virtual reality to expose volunteers to variations of the trolley problem and studied how they behaved, they were surprised at what they found.

We found quite the opposite, Leon Stfeld, first author of a paper on the research in journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, said in a press release. 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.

The implication, the researchers say, is that human-like decision making in these situations would not be that complicated to incorporate into driverless vehicles, and they suggest this could present a viable solution for programming ethics into self-driving cars.

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

There are clear pitfalls with both questions. Self-driving cars present an obvious case where a machine could have to make high-stakes ethical decisions that most people would agree are fairly black or white.

But once you start insisting on programming ethical decision-making into some autonomous systems, it could be hard to know where to draw the line.

Should a computer program designed to decide on loan applications also be made to mimic the moral judgements a human bank worker most likely would if face-to-face with a client? What about one meant to determine whether or not a criminal should be granted bail?

Both represent real examples of autonomous systems operating in contexts where a human would likely incorporate ethicaljudgements in their decision-making. But unlike the self-driving car example, a persons judgement in these situations is likely to be highly colored by their life experience and political views. Modeling these kinds of decisions may not be so easy.

Even if human behavior is consistent, that doesnt mean its necessarily the best way of doing things, as Knig alludes to. Humans are not always very rational and can be afflicted by all kinds of biases that could feed into their decision-making.

The alternative, though, is hand-coding morality into these machines, and it is fraught with complications. For a start, the chances of reaching an unambiguous consensus on what particular ethical code machines should adhere to are slim.

Even if you can, though, a study in Science I covered last June suggests it wouldnt necessarily solve the problem. A survey of US residents found that most people thoughtself-driving cars should be governed by utilitarian ethics that seek to minimize the total number of deaths in a crash even if it harms the passengers.

But it also found most respondents would not ride in these vehicles themselves or support regulations enforcing utilitarian algorithms on them.

In the face of such complexities, programming self-driving cars to mimic peoples instinctive decision-making could be an attractive alternative. For a start, building models of human behavior simply required the researchers to collect data and feed it into a machine learning system.

Another upside is that it would prevent a situation where programmers are forced to write algorithms that could potentially put people in harms way. By basing the behavior of self-driving cars on a model of our collective decision making we would, in a way, share the responsibility for the decisions they make.

At the end of the day, humans are not perfect, but over the millennia weve developed some pretty good rules of thumb for life and death situations. Faced with the potential pitfalls of trying to engineer self-driving cars to be better than us, it might just be best to trust those instincts.

Stock Media provided by Iscatel / Pond5

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Should Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions Like We Do? - Singularity Hub

You might think of hackers as people sitting at computers, but custom software applications, or bots, can be the ones doing the dirty work. Bots automate the business of hacking, tearing through massive troves of stolen account data, for example, or bombarding website login pages with passwords, probing for hits.

Enter Unbotify, an Israeli tech startup that analyzes human behavior patterns to differentiate between bots and humans and weed out the fakers.

Our claim is we are not raising the bar a little bit and waiting for the fraudsters to catch up as others do said Eran Magril, vice president of product and operations. We are looking at the data points which are the hardest for them to fake in order to go undetected.

The company took first place at the 2017 Cyberstorm competition last month at Tel Aviv University. It was also ranked first among Israels most innovative companies in 2017 by Fast Company magazine. Its product uses behavioral biometrics like how long keys are held down, how a mouse is moved and how a device is held to determine whether the user is a person or a bot.

We know if you are holding your device at a specific angle, and what happens if you tap your mobile device, how does this angle change? Magril said. This is a very granulated kind of data that even if youre just putting your phone on the table, it will still be sending data about the x, y, z [axes] of your machine and how it changes all the time from very small vibrations in the room.

Bots are the preferred method for committing the most common kinds of online fraud, which can cost industries millions of dollars or sway public opinion on important issues.

Eran Magril, Unbotifys vice president of product and operations. (Courtesy)

Account data stolen in attacks on major corporations can be bought on the dark web and used to take over other accounts that use the same credentials. Those accounts can then be abused in myriad ways to cash out, including buying products with saved payment methods and stealing stored gift cards or air miles.

In one case, a bot was attempting to register new accounts with an online retailer. It continuously entered emails to see if any were already registered and built a database of those that were. Then it tested common passwords on each in order to take over any accounts it gained access to.

With an average success rate of two percent, Magril said, a hacker with one million sets of credentials can take over 20,000 accounts. Thats the power of automation for fraudsters, he said. If they have automation they can operate on a big scale.

Other common tactics include content scraping and advertising fraud. Scraping is when a website uses bots to scan for competitors price changes and deals to get an unfair competitive advantage, or copies content like an airlines flight prices and availability in order to sell airline tickets on a separate platform, which diverts valuable traffic from the original sellers website.

Online ad fraud takes many forms, including bots simulating traffic to websites advertisers pay to run ads that arent being seen or clicked on by real people. Some bots will download and install games and programs that advertisers pay platforms for. Such tactics cost the industry billions of dollars each year.

That money goes to hackers instead, who keep getting more sophisticated, said Magril. This is also where the funding comes for developing new attack tools, for developing new bots, he said. Bots are always evolving because they have the incentive to evolve.

Bots are also used to create fake social media profiles that can flood specific countries and locales with legitimate or hoax news stories to influence public opinion. Fake profiles can ratchet up a public figures or companys popularity on a given platform, then disappear on command, creating the illusion that the subject lost support.

Its a huge problem and everyone is talking about it, especially in the last year with the elections in the United States and France and other places, Magril said.

Unbotifys technology goes well beyond the leading detection and protection measures, he said, because machines cant fake human behavior in all its diversity and complexity. The companys 12 employees are also constantly adding new characteristics to what they analyze to keep hackers from knowing what needs to be mimicked.

Founded two years ago by Yaron Oliker and Alon Dayan, the company has raised some $2 million from Israeli based Maverick Ventures. It boasts as its chief data scientist Yaacov Fernandess, whom Magril called a world-class expert in machine learning, of which there are only a handful, he said. Their headquarters are in the northern Israel town of Ramat Yishai.

Company founder Yaron Oliker. (Courtesy)

While the current product targets automation only, the company has noticed that there are specific behavioral indicators that can identify a person who is creating fake accounts. Certain keystroke habits, for instance, might be common among people who repeatedly register new accounts, without the help of a bot. We saw that analysis of behavioral biometrics can also be used to differentiate between different groups of people with different intentions, Magril said.

The company is focused on its core technology for now, though, and wants to break into new markets. They have customers in the US and Europe, and want to expand their clientele to China.

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Israeli startup tracks behavior to outsmart hacker bots - The Times of Israel

On June 18, 2013, when he was already well-known in political circles for his birther attacks on then-President Barack Obama, Donald Trump made an exciting announcement.

The Miss Universe Pageant will be broadcast live from MOSCOW, RUSSIA on November 9th, he tweeted. A big deal that will bring our countries together!

Doing business with Russia was in no way illegal at the time (this was before the invasion of Ukraine that triggered the current level of Western sanctions) and wasnt even particularly unusual. The stated aspiration that a tacky pageant would help bring the countries together was somewhat odd, especially given the then-overwhelming consensus in Republican Party circles that the Obama administration was too soft on Russia. But Trump is nothing if not a self-promoter, and pretending that his upcoming television special would have important diplomatic ramifications seems like a bit of harmless puffery.

But the follow-up tweet was genuinely weird.

Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?

By this time, the Putin regime was already infamous for its crackdown on domestic dissent, brutal war in Chechnya, the murders of journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov at home and Alexander Litvinenko in London, and the ultimately failed poisoning of former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko.

That years State Department human rights report documented several reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, while Human Rights Watch concluded that Russias cooperation with international institutions on human rights appears perfunctory.

Theres nothing particularly unusual about the United States enjoying cordial diplomatic or even business ties with authoritarian regimes that are also geopolitical allies. But Russia was not an ally of the United States, and Putin wasnt someone average Americans especially average Republicans tended to like. For Trump to express his desire for a friendly, personal relationship with the brutal and autocratic ruler of a hostile foreign country was odd.

But it proved to be the beginning of whats become, over the years, a signature element of Trumps thinking. Hes attached much more stubbornly than he is to any of his various heterodoxies on domestic policy to the idea of a Russia-friendly foreign policy that almost nobody else (including Republican lawmakers and key members of his own administration) believes in.

Thats the great mystery looming over all of the growing Trump/Russia scandals. Firmly disavowing Putin would be just about the lowest-hanging political fruit imaginable. Why wont Trump pluck it?

Soon after Election Day, it became clear that the question of Russian meddling in the 2016 election was going to be a substantial political problem for Trump. It also became clear that, as president, he was going to have to find a way to work with Republican Russia hawks in Congress and with an American military and intelligence community thats profoundly skeptical of Russia.

But before the election, he was considerably less restrained, and claimed to have a direct line to the Kremlin back in 2013, 2014, and even through much of 2015:

Later, of course, Trumps story changed. The current line from the president and his team is that any talk of him having anything to do with Russia is fake news and that he never met Putin before taking office. And, of course, Trump has lied about many things over the years. Its entirely possible that the year he spent insisting that hed been in contact with Putin and the broader Russian governing elite was just another example of Trump lying.

But its a strange thing to do. Stranger still is Trumps willingness to publicly defend Putins dismal human rights record.

Lots of American businessmen make money in countries with deplorable human rights records, and lots of American politicians are advocates for strategic alliances and commercial ties with countries that have deplorable human rights records.

But while overlooking abuses is common, its fairly unusual to straightforwardly deny them and especially to do so in a situation where there isnt any clear political, business, or strategic rationale for doing so. But Trump spent a good deal of time acting as a Putin spokesperson in the American press:

The eagerness to make excuses for Putins conduct seemed linked, rhetorically, to a somewhat half-baked notion that under Trump the United States and Russia would enjoy warmer relations.

There's nothing I can think of that I'd rather do than have Russia friendly, he said in a July 27, 2016, news conference. As opposed to the way they are right now, so that we can go and knock out ISIS with other people.

Later that day at a campaign rally, Trump said, wouldnt it be a great thing if we could get along with Putin? During the October 9 presidential debate, Trump returned to the theme that I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together, as an example.

Shortly before Inauguration Day, on January 11, 2017, Trump said, If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia. Russia can help us fight ISIS.

Trumps early personnel and policy moves matched up with this desire.

He quickly tapped retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, known as an outlier among American military and intelligence professionals for his pro-Russian views, to serve as his national security adviser. And he bypassed the entire range of conventionally qualified candidates to serve as secretary of state in favor of Exxon executive Rex Tillerson, a former recipient of Russias Order of Friendship award. Early in his administration, Trump aimed to relax sanctions on Russia, only to back down in the face of congressional opposition.

In the end, Trumps Russia policy has landed in a more conventional place than these early moves would have suggested. Tillerson toed the standard American foreign policy line during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary James Mattis is a very normal Republican Russia hawk, and Flynn got fired and replaced with the much more widely respected Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser.

But Trump himself has acted in many ways like an outsider to his own administrations Russia policy. But while hes simply detached from the details on many issues, he has pushed back forcefully against both Congress and his own advisers repeatedly on Russian matters.

This oddness begins with simply the way that Trump talks about Putin.

Obama called him a thug. So did Mitt Romney. Paul Ryan called him a devious thug. Marco Rubio called him both a thug and a gangster.

Trump fairly consistently declines to adopt this conventional language among American politicians, and he does so even though he is clearly aware at this point and has been for some time that suspicions about the nature of his relationship with the Russian government are a key point of political vulnerability. It would be the easiest thing on the planet for Trump to have his communications team draw up some standard-issue US-politician Putin-bashing rhetoric hes a thug, he murders journalists, he invades his neighbors and at a minimum assure Republican Party foreign policy elites that hes now down with the program.

After all, Trump used to espouse very unconventional views on things like tax cuts for the rich, Medicaid, and the importance of establishing universal health insurance coverage.

But in order to consolidate his position as leader of the GOP, Trump has dropped those ideologically heterodox views even though the heterodox position was more popular. On Russia, however, he insists on flying in the face of bipartisan consensus.

Watch: Trump is asked if he believes Russia interfered in our election, instead attacks Obama and the media. https://t.co/IrfviRPwru

Hes reluctant to even acknowledge that Russian hacking took place, resorting even to ridiculous lies about G20 conversations to change the subject.

Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!

Perhaps most shockingly, Trumps own team of advisers had to drag him kicking and screaming into affirming Americas commitment to upholding Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. And he did it only after humiliating those very same advisers by letting them brief the media that an affirmation was coming, only to cut it on the fly from the prepared text of his speech.

It was a bizarre thing to do, it clearly benefitted Russian foreign policy objectives, and it offered nothing but political downside for Trump.

The intersection of politics and law is a funny thing.

Politicized investigations into potential presidential scandals often end up turning on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, making false statements to investigators, and other fine-grained ways in which people can get legally tripped up when theyre trying to cover embarrassing information. The much-discussed possibility of collusion with Russian election hacking is both vaguely defined, unproven at this point, and even if it happened may not have involved the president personally in any way.

These things end up hinging on small details, and the small details can be crucially important.

But the big picture also matters, and the big picture here is that Trump remains stubbornly unwilling to break with Putin and the Kremlin. The president used to regularly brag about his contacts with the leaders of the Russian government. The president won the election with the helping hand of the Russian government. The president repeatedly expressed his desire to change US foreign policy in a more pro-Russian direction. And though the president has, so far, been largely stymied in his efforts to do this seems to be straining against constraints imposed by the leadership of his own party and his own foreign policy team.

Perhaps Trump was lying about the contacts, ignorant about the campaign proposals, and his current attitudes reflect nothing more than bull-headedness.

Certainly thats what his Republican collaborators on the Hill seem to be telling themselves even as the White House works to get House Republicans to block a Russia sanctions bill that passed the Senate with 97 votes. But the mystery remains. Trump has been willing to reverse himself on other policy issues, gets no political benefit from pursuing such a pro-Russian course in the face of bipartisan opposition, and could score easy points by doing a little formulaic Putin-bashing. The fact that he refuses to tells you a lot about why Trumps presidency remains mired in scandal and why the worst may still be to come.

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Donald Trump's fishy behavior on Russia is bigger than possible email collusion - Vox