We May Be Able to Teach Cars to Drive; but Can We Teach Them to Be Ethical?

Featured article by Jeremy Sutter, Independent Technology Author

The idea of a self-driving car seems perfect in theory. Fatalities have been a tragic reality ever since driving became widespread, so it’s easy to understand why an autonomous car, one that eliminates the chance of fatal consequences caused by human errors of neglect and distraction, would appeal to so many, not to mention that naturally safer driving records would be more likely to have low insurance premiums. However, some have expressed concern that self-driving cars will not be able to come up to snuff in one crucial area: ethics.

How can a machine be unethical?

It might seem oxymoronic. After all, a self-driving car is, in simplest terms, a machine. Machines are not understood to be good or bad; they simply do what they are supposed to. However, self-driving cars still risk being in dangerous scenarios on the road and at crucial moments, their calculations might backfire and cause them to make fatal errors. Important figures in transportation and technology are adamant that the possible risks involved with self-driving cars need to be taken seriously.

Skeptics

Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, says a scenario could occur in which a self-driving car swerves to avoid an oncoming truck only to come in collision with pedestrians on the sidewalk. It wouldn’t be intentional, but it would be devastating.

“Those kinds of ethical choices will be inevitable,” Hart said.

Similarly, Ryan Calo, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington with expertise in robotics law, says that while self-driving cars are likely to make far fewer errors than those operated by humans, there are still likely to make mistakes, ones that most human drivers would never make.

“If if it encounters a shopping cart and a stroller at the same time, it won’t be able to make a moral decision that groceries are less important than people,” Calo said. “But what if it’s saving tens of thousands of lives overall because it’s safer than people?”

Optimism

Some believe that self-driving cars could be designed so that they are able to respond to these ethical quandaries. One of those people is Patrick Lin,a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif. According to Lin, the technology is very much possible, but it needs to be implemented before self-driving cars go into widespread usage.

“It’s better if we proactively try to anticipate and manage the problem before we actually get there,” Lin said. “This is the kind of thing that’s going to make for a lawsuit that could destroy a company or leave a huge black mark on the industry.”

A Complicated Matter

Surveys were recently published in “Science” about the ethics of self-driving cars based on a series of questions. Six scenarios were offered; in all of them, the question is whether it is preferred for the self-driving car to swerve to avoid pedestrians and kill its passengers or to strike the pedestrians. Neither situation is ideal, but the consensus was that killing the passengers was preferred from a moral standpoint.

Already someone has been killed occupying a self-driving car, Joshua Brown, was killed by a truck while using his Tesla Model S running on its Autopilot feature. This is just one death, and impossibly low compared to the number of people killed in car accidents on a daily basis. Nonetheless, the hope for a self-driving car is to eliminate the chance of death via car accidents completely. Though self-driving cars have shown to be demonstrably safer than human-driven ones, it might be a matter of waiting for perfect, rather than simply accepting “just about perfect.”