The ethical dilemma of selfdriving cars Patrick Lin
This is a thought experiment.
Let’s say at some point
in the not so distant future,
you’re barreling down the highway
in your self-driving car,
and you find yourself boxed in
on all sides by other cars.
Suddenly, a large, heavy object
falls off the truck in front of you.
Your car can’t stop in time
to avoid the collision,
so it needs to make a decision:
go straight and hit the object,
swerve left into an SUV,
or swerve right into a motorcycle.
Should it prioritize your safety
by hitting the motorcycle,
minimize danger to others by not swerving,
even if it means hitting the large object
and sacrificing your life,
or take the middle ground
by hitting the SUV,
which has a high passenger safety rating?
So what should the self-driving car do?
If we were driving that boxed in car
in manual mode,
whichever way we’d react
would be understood as just that,
a reaction,
not a deliberate decision.
It would be an instinctual panicked move
with no forethought or malice.
But if a programmer were to instruct
the car to make the same move,
given conditions it may
sense in the future,
well, that looks more
like premeditated homicide.
Now, to be fair,
self-driving cars are predicted
to dramatically reduce traffic accidents
and fatalities
by removing human error
from the driving equation.
Plus, there may be all sorts
of other benefits:
eased road congestion,
decreased harmful emissions,
and minimized unproductive
and stressful driving time.
But accidents can and will still happen,
and when they do,
their outcomes may be determined
months or years in advance
by programmers or policy makers.
And they’ll have
some difficult decisions to make.
It’s tempting to offer up general
decision-making principles,
like minimize harm,
but even that quickly leads
to morally murky decisions.
For example,
let’s say we have the same initial set up,
but now there’s a motorcyclist
wearing a helmet to your left
and another one without
a helmet to your right.
Which one should
your robot car crash into?
If you say the biker with the helmet
because she’s more likely to survive,
then aren’t you penalizing
the responsible motorist?
If, instead, you save the biker
without the helmet
because he’s acting irresponsibly,
then you’ve gone way beyond the initial
design principle about minimizing harm,
and the robot car is now
meting out street justice.
The ethical considerations
get more complicated here.
In both of our scenarios,
the underlying design is functioning
as a targeting algorithm of sorts.
In other words,
it’s systematically favoring
or discriminating
against a certain type
of object to crash into.
And the owners of the target vehicles
will suffer the negative consequences
of this algorithm
through no fault of their own.
Our new technologies are opening up
many other novel ethical dilemmas.
For instance, if you had to
choose between
a car that would always save
as many lives as possible in an accident,
or one that would save you at any cost,
which would you buy?
What happens if the cars start analyzing
and factoring in
the passengers of the cars
and the particulars of their lives?
Could it be the case
that a random decision
is still better than a predetermined one
designed to minimize harm?
And who should be making
all of these decisions anyhow?
Programmers? Companies?
Governments?
Reality may not play out exactly
like our thought experiments,
but that’s not the point.
They’re designed to isolate
and stress test our intuitions on ethics,
just like science experiments do
for the physical world.
Spotting these moral hairpin turns now
will help us maneuver the unfamiliar road
of technology ethics,
and allow us to cruise confidently
and conscientiously
into our brave new future.