Driverless cars ‘will decide who to hit in an accident’
Vehicles could make moral choices and weigh up lives in a crash, warn lawyers
DRIVERLESS cars could be programmed to make moral decisions about who to collide with in an accident, say leading lawyers.
In situations where a crash is inevitable, autonomous vehicles may have to be given instructions about how to choose the lesser of two evils – potentially deciding to risk killing a single pedestrian on the pavement rather than several people in the road.
Cars in the future may even need to weigh up the value of individual lives, a report says.
In a technological version of the famous “trolley problem”, the report warns: “Persons generally are entitled to expect that a self-driving vehicle will not collide with and injure them. However, in reality, the situation is much more nuanced.”
With the UK Government claiming driverless cars will be in use on Britain’s roads within two years, potentially including driverless shuttle buses on the Forth Road Bridge, the Faculty of Advocates says there is an urgent need to consider the implications of the arrival of autonomous vehicles.
The faculty’s comments come in response to a consultation on the implications of driverless vehicles by the Scottish Law Commission (SLC) and the Law Commission in London.
The SLC says the technology raises a host of legal and ethical questions which the public have yet to engage with.
The trolley problem famously asks whether a person at the controls of a runaway trolley-car heading for five people on the tracks should pull the lever to switch on to a track where only one person will be hit. Variations ask whether it would make a difference if the single person was Albert Einstein and the five people were housebreakers.
The Faculty of Advocates says the question could arise with self-driving cars, and even the suggestion that judgments could be made about the value of individual lives is not outlandish. While an autonomous car might not have enough information to make a choice between a leading scientist and criminals, it says that could change in a country like China,
where the government is currently establishing a “social credit” score for its citizens. It adds: “We cannot conceive of any circumstances whatever where such a system could be regarded as acceptable in a free, open and democratic society.”
However the faculty envisages a future where owners may even be able to choose the “morality” of their car, the report says, adding: “The purchaser might be able to specify the ethical system with which the car is programmed... as well as specifying the paint colour and interior trim”.
The legal implications to driverless technologies are considerable, the report claims. But while they could be governed by automated programmes based on predictable algorithms, artificial intelligence experts are developing neural networks, systems which make their own decisions.
The faculty experts conclude that new offences are likely to be necessary to cover the systems set up by companies to control driverless vehicles – and to hold them to account in the case of errors, malfunctions and accidents. The faculty’s submission is one of the most thorough of hundreds submitted to a joint consultation by the Scottish Law Commission and the Law Commission of England and Wales as part of a three-year review of laws for self-driving cars.
Caroline Drummond, commissioner at the SLC, said: “The advent of driverless cars raises an enormous range of aspects, such as jay-walking which we do fairly freely here but isn’t allowed in other countries. It won’t work with autonomous vehicles.”