The Passengers

John Marrs’s The Passengers imagines a near future in which the government is mandating fully autonomous (Level 5) vehicles, a reality that real-world companies like Waymo and Tesla anticipate. This technological context is essential for understanding the novel’s central conflict, which hinges on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). The core dilemma facing autonomous vehicle developers is how to program a machine to make a moral choice in an unavoidable crash, a scenario famously illustrated by the philosophical “trolley problem” (a classic thought experiment that asks whether to let a runaway trolley kill five people or pull a lever so that it kills only one). This requires embedding a form of utilitarian ethics into AI, forcing it to perform a “moral calculus” to determine the outcome that causes the least harm.

The novel’s Vehicle Inquest Jury analyzes crashes in which a car’s AI “has calculated the risk cost” (62) to minimize fatalities, a process that reflects a real, ongoing debate. This debate was notably the subject of MIT’s “Moral Machine” experiment, a global survey in which millions of people decided who an autonomous vehicle should sacrifice in various crash scenarios. The results were published in Nature in 2018 (Awad, Edmond et al. “The Moral Machine experiment.” Nature, 24 October 2018). They revealed that while some preferences were global (prioritizing human lives over animals’ lives, prioritizing younger people’s lives, and saving as many lives as possible), others varied by culture, highlighting the difficulty of creating a single, universal AI morality. Demographic factors like income, gender, and religiosity did not significantly impact the results.

In the novel, the Hacker exploits this same ethical ambiguity by inviting the public to vote on the Passengers’ survival. The Hacker’s actions transform a theoretical problem into a terrifying reality and critique any system that quantifies human worth, but specifically interrogate the UK government’s use of the system to effect “social cleansing.”