Not in Control,but Liable?Attributing Human Responsibility for Fully Automated Vehicle Accidents

Human agency has become increasingly limited in complex systems with increasingly automated decision-making capabilities.For instance,human occupants are passengers and do not have direct vehicle control in fully automated cars(i.e.,driverless cars).An interesting question is whether users are responsible for the accidents of these cars.Normative ethical and legal analyses frequently argue that individuals should not bear responsibility for harm beyond their control.Here,we consider human judgment of responsibility for accidents involving fully automated cars through three studies with seven experiments(N=2668).We compared the responsibility attributed to the occupants in three conditions:an owner in his private fully automated car,a passenger in a driverless robotaxi,and a passenger in a conventional taxi,where none of these three occupants have direct vehicle control over the involved vehicles that cause identical pedestrian injury.In contrast to normative analyses,we show that the occupants of driverless cars(private cars and robotaxis)are attributed more responsibility than conventional taxi passengers.This dilemma is robust across different contexts(e.g.,participants from China vs the Republic of Korea,participants with first-vs third-person perspectives,and occupant presence vs absence).Furthermore,we observe that this is not due to the perception that these occupants have greater control over driving but because they are more expected to foresee the potential consequences of using driverless cars.Our findings suggest that when driverless vehicles(private cars and taxis)cause harm,their users may face more social pressure,which public discourse and legal regulations should manage appropriately.

Multisensory Conflict Impairs Cortico-Muscular Network Connectivity and Postural Stability: Insights from Partial Directed Coherence Analysis

Sensory conflict impacts postural control,yet its effect on cortico-muscular interaction remains underexplored.We aimed to investigate sensory conflict's influence on the cortico-muscular network and postural stability.We used a rotating platform and virtual reality to present subjects with congruent and incongruent sensory input,recorded EEG(electroencephalogram)and EMG(electromyogram)data,and constructed a directed connectivity network.The results suggest that,compared to sensory congruence,during sensory conflict:(1)connectivity among the sensorimotor,visual,and posterior parietal cortex generally decreases,(2)cortical control over the muscles is weakened,(3)feedback from muscles to the cortex is strengthened,and(4)the range of body sway increases and its complexity decreases.These results underline the intricate effects of sensory conflict on cortico-muscular networks.During the sensory conflict,the brain adaptively decreases the integration of conflicting information.Without this integrated information,cortical control over muscles may be lessened,whereas the muscle feedback may be enhanced in compensation.

Public aversion against ChatGPT in creative fields?

Dear Editor,Machines,powered by artificial intelligence(AI)and other innovations,are expanding the scope of tasks that they can do.1,2 They have outperformed human professionals in objective tasks such as weather forecasting and image-based disease diagnosis.They are even reaching or surpassing humans in subjective and creative tasks.In late November 2022,OpenAI released an AI chatbot named ChatGPT-3.5(hereafter,ChatGPT)and an image generator named DALL-E2,which took the internet by storm with their excellent capabilities in understanding human intentions and performing various human tasks.