How to Build a Morally Ethical Self-Driving Car
A road hazard appears in front of your autonomous taxi. Will it make a choice that saves you but kills others? Or will it decide to save others at the price of its passenger?
What happens when the road gets bumpier?
Photographer: Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images
Not too long ago, tech enthusiasts were telling us that by 2020, we'd see self-driving cars hit the mainstream, with some 10 million on the roads. That turned out to be a wild overestimation. The actual number of vehicles in testing is thousands of times smaller, and they're still driving mostly in controlled conditions. Companies have also scaled back their ambitions, aiming more for driver support than full autonomy, just as sober-minded transport experts told us to expect.
But slower development is probably just as well, as it should help improve vehicle safety and give engineers time to prepare for other threats, such as hackers turning cars into destructive weapons. Slower rollout also gives us a chance to form some social consensus on the built-in ethics of autonomous vehicles, which will inevitably face decisions with moral implications — being forced to choose, for example, between killing the car's passengers by hitting a tree or veering into a nearby group of pedestrians.