A self-driving car loses its brakes. Nobody is at the wheel. Sometimes you are in the car. Sometimes you are on the crossing.
13 crossings, about 5 minutes. Time slows while you choose. Not everyone hit dies.
An experiment by Sanctity AI, inspired by MIT's Moral Machine.
Do nothing and the car stays in its lane.
Pick one, or skip.
Each crossing trades off a few things at once: how many lives, age, fitness, status, gender, animals or people, passengers or pedestrians, crossing legally, and whether the car has to swerve. Your choices train a small statistical model of how much each one matters to you.
The next crossing is not random. Early on, each one is picked to learn the most about whatever the model is least sure of. Later, each one is picked to settle the single question your profile hangs on: which principle sets you apart most. How long you hesitate counts too. A fast answer is read as a clear preference, a slow one as a close call.
Twice, the game replays a crossing you judged from the street, but puts you inside the group you chose to sacrifice. That is the mirror test. Where you stand also counts: watching from the street, standing on the crossing, sitting in the driver's seat or in the back.
The world markers are approximate values read from the published results of the Moral Machine experiment (Awad and colleagues, Nature, 2018), which collected 40 million decisions from 233 countries and territories. Three dimensions are new to The Crossing and have no world marker yet: your own life, survival odds, and pets with owners versus strays. The original study never put players in the scene and assumed everyone hit would die.
The Crossing is an experiment by Sanctity AI. It is inspired by, and not affiliated with, MIT's Moral Machine.
In every crossing, a driverless car's brakes have failed. It can stay in its lane or swerve into the other one. There is no right answer, only yours.
Two things the original Moral Machine never did. Some crossings put your own life at stake, in the car or on the road. And some carry survival odds: passengers in a crash, or people hit at lower speed, may live. When odds apply, the outcome is rolled for real.
The game adapts as you play. Each new crossing is chosen to learn the most about the trade-offs you care about, so thirteen are enough to build a clear profile. At the end you see how you compare with 40 million decisions from the original Moral Machine study.
The Crossing is an experiment by Sanctity AI, inspired by MIT's Moral Machine (Awad and colleagues, Nature, 2018). It is not affiliated with MIT.