Driverless cars raise ethical questions
SUNNYVALE, CALIF.— The prospect of autonomous cars, which is quickly approaching reality, brings with it countless challenges. And they’re not all technical. There are also matters of regulation, standards, insurance and liability to be considered, to name a few. There’s also the matter of ethics. That’s a brand-new field for car designers and engineers. Up until now, most of the driver assistance technologies that are steppingstones to full autonomy are just driver aids. The ultimate driving decisions are still in the hands of the driver.
But with fully autonomous vehicles, those decisions will all have to be made by the software programmed into the car. That’s where ethical considerations come in.
How would you like to be the programmer who has to decide what to do in the case of a child running onto the road in front, from behind a parked van, with a loaded school bus approaching in the opposite lane — and not enough time or room to stop?
Should the autonomous car swerve into the parked car, which may or may not have people inside? Or take a chance colliding with the bus, the children inside of which undoubtedly are unbelted? Or brake as hard as it can to limit the force of impact with the child? Or something else?
Ethical questions, such as whether to hit a parked car or a school bus, will need to be programmed into autonomous vehicles
Those are the kind of questions engineers and programmers at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America (MRDNA) have to address as they work on development of autonomous vehicles.
It’s new territory for which there are no obvious “right” answers. And it has the company seeking input from noncustomary sources.
Such an out-of-the norm approach is nothing new for MRDNA, which was established here in Silicon Valley 20 years ago precisely because it was foreign territory for the auto industry. That move — the first by any automaker — gave the company an inside track into the fastmoving digital culture that has since become core to the future of the automobile. And access to people and companies that are driving that progress.
One of those people is J. Christian Gerdes, a mechanical engineering professor at nearby Stanford University who co-authored a paper called “Implementable Ethics for Autonomous Vehicles.”
Speaking to a group of automotive journalists, Gerdes told us that ethical considerations encompass not just such dramatic situations as the potential crash dilemma described above but mundane everyday decisions as whether or not to break the law and if so by how much. Decisions such as whether to cross a double-yellow-line to avoid a disabled car on the road and prevent a traffic backup or to exceed the speed limit so as not to create a moving chicane for other traffic that is moving faster.
They’re situations to which a driver might respond without conscious thought. But the responses of an autonomous vehicle will have to be programmed consciously on the basis of some pre-defined ethical priorities.
Add ethics to the list of obstacles the auto industry will have to overcome on the road to autonomous cars.