There Is A Terrible Idea Summary

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.

Utilitarian Ethics are measured by the ends resulting in greater total happiness versus the initial means to get there. Therefore the most optimal way that Utilitarianism works is through the greatest utility to all. If I were to keep an eye out for the vehicle in question, I would only be serving myself and the tow truck driver. The utility that would serve the greater

Windsor researched into this possibility. He asks these simple, but important questions “But should they be programmed to make the decision that is best for their owners? Or the choice that does the least harm -- even if that means choosing to slam into a retaining wall to avoid hitting an oncoming school bus?” Once I read over the first question I knew that the ugliness of business would rather develop a car that takes their customers lives into greater importance than other drivers. It would not make sense to program a car to save the life of other drivers when they are not paying to have a “safety guard”, if you

As many people head out to start their days, a good majority will get into their cars and face many split second decisions. As humans when faced with split second decisions, it is impossible to always make the right choice. Autonomous cars are unable to make ethical decisions, such as deciding which way to swerve where both either direction (right or left) could endanger others.

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.

Currently one of the main topics of discussion in the AI community is self driving cars. Self driving cars would be much safer than manually operated cars and with a lot of work they could even be developed to form a network across the country they are in so that they can “talk” to each other. This would greatly reduce the amount of deaths resulting from cars. However self driving cars have also raised plenty of issues such as the fact they could put many professional drivers out of work. Furthermore there are many moral issues raised by automated cars, the trolley problem, a problem involving choosing between killing one or more persons as opposed to another group/person, is a very popular theory right now as self driving cars would have to

Say you’re in the market for a new car and are given the choice between a standard vehicle, or an autonomous vehicle (AV). The typical vehicle you operate and drive yourself, while the AV does that for you, thus allowing you the freedom to do other tasks while in the car. Which would you choose? Personally, a self-driving car sounds extremely time saving. However, before we get too comfortable with the idea of a vehicle that can operate itself, we must consider the ethical issues involved with such an invention. We must also determine how AVs should be programmed in order to handle hard ethical dilemmas. I think AV’s should be programmed in a way that they prioritize their passenger’s safety, while still attempting to minimize overall harm done outside the vehicle. To promote this thesis, I will look at two thought experiments, the potential outcomes, and the best way to program AV based on certain ethical views such as consequentialism. I will then show why I believe prioritizing passenger’s safety is important. This paper does not intend to provide a clear solution to the ethical issues surrounding AVs, but rather intends to address factors, in addition to minimizing harm that programmers need to consider.

In addition, the use of AI is quite controversial from an ethics standpoint. The trolley problem is a no-win situation where it is guaranteed that either one person or a group of people will die, based on the choices made by an outsider, who in this case would be the car. If programmed to choose the most utilitarian outcome, the driver of the car would perish in such a scenario. Knowing this information, the requirement of self driving cars could cause an extreme public outcry.

This kind of technology was developed with the intention of improving the quality of life of people by eliminating human error, which, as mentioned previously, accounts for 95% of all car crashes. When compared to autonomous vehicles, “researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent.” (4) I believe engineers developed this technology acting on their duty to improve the quality of life of the public. I am an Electronic Systems Engineering Technology student and I am currently working on a senior design project, which consists of providing a certain level of autonomy to a go-kart. My team and I are developing a vehicle-to-vehicle communication and control system (V2VC2). My project is a baseline project that in the long run hopes to reduce the amount of human exposure in dangerous grounds. I have been working on this project for almost a year now and before starting it, I did extensive research on autonomous vehicles. With the knowledge I have gained after researching this topic and working on my project, I have developed a utilitarian view on the subject. I believe that engineers worked and continue to work hard to minimize the risk to people on the roads with the development of this technology. This kind of technology is fairly new, and it has caused human deaths, but its something engineers are still trying to improve with the end goal of minimizing human deaths. There is still a long way to go before this kind of technology is perfected, but there are trying to develop measures to prevent further damage to the

Autonomous automobiles are the future of transportation but engineers face ethical problems to its implementation. Engineers will have to work with ethicists to design morally responsible self-driving cars and encourage participation from a wide variety of

If you have it set that utilitarianism is your ethical standard, then by definition the best course of action is the one that maximizes utility or happiness. Again, let’s say that you see the collision that is going to occur, will your car be able to sense that you know this person? If you have utilitarianism dialed down to maximize your own happiness, the car would take the path with the 5 people knowing you will be less affected by killing 5 random people as opposed to this 1 person that you know. On the other hand, if you have utilitarianism dialed all the way up and therefore it is maximizing the overall happiness, then the car would choose the path of killing the 1 person instead of the 5. This way, less people have been killed and therefore less family and friends have been affected, right? What if the 5 people all happened to single and had no family left, just friends? Let’s say this one person had a big family, children, and plenty of friends, what then? Would the car setting be able to take these things into account. In this situation, maybe the car would rather take the path with the 5 people because they wouldn’t be missed as much as the 1 person. Less people would suffer over the death of the 5 than the death of the 1 and therefore this decision has maximized overall happiness. Maybe you disagree with me or think that my examples are too extreme. The author of this article used

In the article Why Self Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill, there are robotic cars being manufactured. These vehicles will get better gas mileage and prevent less accidents compared to human driven vehicles. One dilemma due to these robotic vehicles is if a time comes where you are riding in your robotic vehicle and it heads straight into a group of ten people the only way to save these people is to swerve and crash into a wall killing the driver and the occupants of the vehicle. Most people are comfortable with the idea that self driving cars should be programmed to minimize the death toll. These issues can not be ignored because how much time and money these car companies have endowed in this robotic advanced product. Which one would choose when it comes down to it?

The article “Here’s a Terrible Idea: Robot Cars with Adjustable Ethics Settings,” presents a very interesting dilemma I had not considered before. In theory, it makes sense that an intelligent vehicle could have the capability to determine who and where to wreck should the decision be needed. Unfortunately, the ethical robot car idea is problematic, and comes with numerous moral issues.

When considering the best overall consequences for a situation or for society it would be best to have a utilitarian point of view. Utilitarian’s believe that an act is morally right if and only if its consequences are at least as good as the consequences of every alternative act (Peterson). The consequences are measured in terms of pleasure, wellbeing, and preference satisfaction. According to Dr. Peterson at Texas A&M, “ Utilitarianism is a criterion of moral rightness, not a decision making procedure”. According to utilitarianism, if the positive consequences do not out weigh the negative for autonomous vehicles; society will therefore not buy an autonomous vehicle. Society will make moral judgments on the consequential facts; such as if

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