Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics

Right now self-driving cars and trucks are hitting the road and will soon be available to the general market . Major companies like Google, Tesla, Uber and Delphi are leading in autonomous cars industry. In the past few years, these companies have made great strides improving this technology. Addressing the concerns for this technology must be concluded before it reaches the general public. Given the current state of automobiles that don’t need drivers the American consumer needs to be mindful that moral decisions this technology is handling puts them at risk due to the fact that this is emerging technology, laws are being made that will shape this technology, and who is choosing who lives and who dies.

In her article “To Hit the Road, Driverless Cars Must Be Safe, Not Perfect,” Nidhi Kalra argues that because humans are untrustworthy when it comes to safe driving, we should adapt to driverless cars. She provides three premises to support her argument. First, she presents the data of deaths and injuries that were caused by human mistakes. Second, she points out that even though driverless cars may never reach perfection, they would never make miscalculations or mistakes that human drivers make all the time, such as drunk driving, drowsy driving, or driving with distraction. Third, she argues that driverless cars offer benefits such as bettering mobility and efficiency, reducing congestion costs and land use. With these primary premises, Kalra persuades that driverless cars should hit the road one day to reduce amounts of accidents that are likely made by human drivers.

As seen by the moral dilemma restricting the growth and ubiquity of smart-cars, artificial intelligence has been relegated to being the lesser mind. Computers may be able to calculate at greater speeds, and outperform the human mind, but the dimension of values within the human mind can never be trumped by this amalgamation of hardware and software. In order to create and use technologies that are able to make decisions involving ethics, there needs to be a clearly defined partition. The reason being that said principles are not delineated in any omnipresent

As society progresses, we are having more and more control over the human brain. Science is perceived as a naturally neutral ground when it comes to ethics, their discoveries are completely dependent on knowledge as opposed to what’s right and what’s wrong, which does, and will continue to raise the ongoing question of how far we’re willing to go. “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be,” Albert Einstein said, “and outside of its domain value, judgments of all kinds remain necessary.” Though flying cars and robots have always seemed so far in the future, it seems that these huge advances of technology overthrowing our common morals and ethics is rapidly approaching.

Similarly, the article “The Moral Challenges of Driverless Cars” explains how driverless cars will be a safer alternative. It explains how humans are more prone to cause an accident than the driverless cars. The article describes the processing behind the vehicles and some problems they face while making them along with how this will delay their production. It also clarifies how the cars will be able to make the decisions that will keep people safe instead of putting them in harm’s way. Finally, the article describes the ethical issues and automation in cars today. According to Kirkpatrick, the cars are equipped with software that determine what reaction to make in different situations that would take a human more time to make, therefore, avoiding an accident. As stated in this article, there is still much work to be done before the cars are actually ready to sell to the public.

At the turn of the 20th century, serious debate raged in courtrooms and newspapers over whether the automobile was inherently evil. In 1907, one court compared automobiles to "ferocious animals" whose owners should be liable for their actions, with the crucial note that "it is not the ferocity of automobiles that is to be feared, but the ferocity of those who drive them." Even now, one of the biggest attractions of autonomous vehicles is the prospect of getting negligent motorists out of the driver's seat. But in terms of the effect on car accident cases, that's just the start.

I find it humorous that this week’s discussion on driverless vehicles is the same exact subject my wife and I were talking about on Sunday during our unscheduled trip back home from Kansas City, Missouri. Since this trip interfered with our other plans, we were discussing how pleasant it would be if our vehicle was one that was automated because we believed we had better things to do with our time. Actually, this idea was even more evident when we became stalled in a traffic jam due to a stalled vehicle on the road. Therefore, if I were a decision maker in regards to driverless vehicles, I would choose Egoism to be the most ethical pre-programmed crash decision software. (O.C. Ferrell, Fraedrich & L. Ferrell, 2013). The reason I chose Egoism

When dealing with autonomous cars, there are many ethical questions raised that need to be answered before they are released on the road. Like if the vehicle is in a situation where it would either hit a person or an oncoming car, which would it choose? Or would the vehicle choose to crash itself into a wall, possibly injuring the occupants?

Basil Hume once said, “Each person matters; no human life is redundant.” Are self driving cars a stupendous or minute idea; as stated in the following passages, “PRO/CON: Is it time to hop in self-driving cars?” written by Tribune News Service; “Caution light is still on for Tesla's Autopilot technology,” written by Scientific American; “Man who is blind "drives" around town in Google's new driverless car,” written by Ashley Halsey III and Michael Laris, Washington Post. If Hume believes that human life is precious, but self-driving cars are risking fatal injuries to human life, what’s the answer? Legalizing self driving cars is a neurotic and harmful idea.

The purpose of this paper is to look at where the moral responsibilities would lie should a collision happen with an autonomous vehicle. Julian Nida-Rumelin, PhD and President of the interdisciplinary Munich Center for Ethics at the University of Munich, along with his graduate student Alexander Hevelke try to determine philosophically where responsibility should be placed both criminally and financially in the event of a car crash.

Mant skeptics wonder how do you go about programming ethics into a car? These people cite the trolley problem as a thought experiment in automated vehicular decision making. Noah J Goodall who works with the Virginia Transportation Services wrote an article on the difficulties of having to quite literally program ethics into a car. Driving involves inherent risk and these self driving vehicles must be a comprehensive exercise in risk management. However, doing so can have unintended consequences. Goodall explains that self driving cars make judgement calls as it is to break the law. For example, Google allows their cars to go faster than designated speed limits to keep up with the flow of traffic as going slower might be dangerous to the vehicle and its occupants. Even in following the law Google’s cars make small ethical decisions. A 2014 patent was filed describing how Google’s cars position themselves within a lane closer to a small vehicle than a large one to maximize the vehicle’s safety. However, in programming cars to behave a certain way, humans are creating unintentional consequences in a device that takes everything literally. A simple example of this is what if cars were designed to prioritize the life of the pedestrian over all others. In the event a crash is imminent with a pedestrian the car is forced to swerve, this could kill the passenger or other people in society. In

Hi Ashley, you have made some good arguments on the utilitarianism philosophy, but I’ll have to disagree with your concept. Ferrell, Fraedrich, and Ferrell (2013) pointed out that the utility view will minimize the total harm by considering the greatest number of people. However, the driverless cars will be the safest way to travel. According to Lin (n.d.), the self-driving cars will remove the human error by eliminating distractions and make road conditions easy to maneuver. So, if I’m in a self-driving vehicle and those around me are in manual mode driving, and they fall asleep behind the wheel or texting while driving on the phone, there is no way I would want my driverless car to sacrifice myself at the expense of someone being careless.

The surveys revealed that the majority of respondents believed autonomous vehicles should be programmed to be "utilitarian," attempting to save the most lives (in this case, the pedestrians) while sacrificing as few as possible (the passengers), said Jean-Francois Bonnefon, a psychological scientist at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and a co-author of the study.

“Can machines have morality?” This is the question proposed both by the research duo Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky in the paper The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Michael R. LaChat in the article Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: An Exercise in the Moral Imagination; however, of the two, Bostrom’s and Yudkowsky’s paper made the more effective argument. Bostrom and Yudkowsky support their argument using extensive use of both logical reasoning and indisputable facts. Contrastingly, LaChat’s article in A.I. Magazine uses mostly personal feelings and thoughts to concatenate his argument. Despite the different techniques the authors used to augment their interpretations of the possibilities and applications of ethics in pertinence

First of all, making a moral decision in some emergency situation may be impossible for an autonomous car. Newcomb (2014) mentions the “tunnel problem” which was a hypothesis about autonomous cars in emergency. There was an autonomous car traveling in a single-lane highway, and a boy who was crossing inside tumbled when the car was going into a tunnel. The car had to strike either side of the tunnel entrance with sacrificing the life of passengers, otherwise hit the boy to death. In this situation, whichever the autonomous car choice, it will take the blame of immorality. Specifically, if an autonomous car was set as