Autonomous Cars May Be Programmed to Take Human Life?

Featured article by Rick DelGado, Independent Technology Author

“Life comes at you fast,” says the Allstate spokesperson, especially when you’re on the road with several thousand pounds going many miles an hour. When life comes at you fast and you’re looking down the barrel at an accident that can hurt you, a pedestrian, or the passengers of another car, you go with your gut instinct. If bad things happen, you chalk it up to the best decision you could have made at the time.

But with self-driving cars, the decision can’t be chalked up to a split-second choice. The decision of these automobiles must be made in advance, before they’re manufactured, by the people who implement the algorithm that says who to save. This reasonably has raised a lot of moral and ethical questions about how your self-driving car should be programmed with backup solutions.

But self-driving cars are undoubtedly coming, and will undoubtedly do some good. What is the good and the bad of an autonomous car programmed to choose someone’s injury or death?

Advantages:

1.It Won’t Make Mistakes

In the heat of the moment, we make decisions that may have been our last resort if we were thinking with clear minds. In a calm situation, we may have chosen to swerve to the left instead of the right, taking us into a ditch instead of a concrete divider; if we hadn’t frozen up, maybe we would have opted for hitting another car over a city bus. You can’t tell what you’ll do in the moment, or what your reaction time will allow you to do. An autonomous car, however, won’t have this dilemma; the decision it makes will be a decision that was made calmly by its programmers, and no matter how high-stakes the situation, it will make the same choice every time. You’ll have your best and most moral chances in an accident, without room for human error.

2.It Can Minimize the Damage

You’re speeding along on the highway, and somebody too distracted by texting swerves slightly, clipping the edge of your car. You’re out of control, and you only have two directions to go – left or right. The right sends you into a heavy duty soccer mom van and left sends you into a motorcycle. The van is sturdy enough to take a hit like this while reducing the chances of death or even extreme injury. If you hit that motorcyclist, they’re dead, and they certainly won’t be able to stop the impact of your car, which may continue into another vehicle. Developers are in the process of creating a self-driving car that will choose the lesser of two evils, which would be the van, allowing all passengers the best chance at getting away unscathed, and in the process, saving the motorcyclist’s life.

Disadvantages:

1.It Can Be Discriminative

Choosing the van helps minimize the potential and devastating damage, but that shouldn’t subtract from one fact: the van was chosen. Without a self-driving car, a human being may have made a completely different decision that left that van and its passengers unscathed, but a program doomed that van to a crash, which very well may turn out bad anyways. Programs follow step-by-step instructions, and that means they must be told under no uncertain terms exactly what is allowed – leading to a programmer saying “this style of car is your target if the need arises.”

2.It Makes You Choose Which Life is Logically More Important

The self-driving car may choose the better of two evils, and you may support it when it means saving a pack of jaywalking children – but would you if that very same act doomed you and your passengers to death or at least extreme injury? While we all want to choose the moral high ground, how many of us would want to step in a car when we know it will choose another life over ours? And if you choose a car that values you as higher, you’re giving it permission to kill in your place. This leaves its passengers with an extreme moral issue to face, and one they’ll have to learn to live with.

by Rick DelGado, Independent Author

“I’ve been blessed to have a successful career and have recently taken a step back to pursue my passion of writing. I’ve started doing freelance writing and I love to write about new technologies and how it can help us and our planet.” – Rick DelGado