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Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit?
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick Lin of California Polytechnic State University explores one of the ethical problems autonomous car developers are going to have to solve: crash prioritization. He posits this scenario: suppose an autonomous car determines a crash is unavoidable, but has the option of swerving right into a small car with few safety features or swerving left into a heavier car that's more structurally sound. Do the people programming the car have it intentionally crash into the vehicle less likely to crumple? It might make more sense, and lead to fewer fatalities — but it sure wouldn't feel that way to the people in the car that got hit. He says, '[W]hile human drivers may be forgiven for making a poor split-second reaction – for instance, crashing into a Pinto that's prone to explode, instead of a more stable object – robot cars won't enjoy that freedom. Programmers have all the time in the world to get it right. It's the difference between premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter.' We could somewhat randomize outcomes, but that would lead to generate just as much trouble. Lin adds, 'The larger challenge, though, isn't thinking through ethical dilemmas. It's also about setting accurate expectations with users and the general public who might find themselves surprised in bad ways by autonomous cars. Whatever answer to an ethical dilemma the car industry might lean towards will not be satisfying to everyone.'"
Actually, this raises a more interesting question (at least to me) which your little thought experiment approaches. What if my autonomous car decides that the action to take that is likely to cause the least harm is to kill the driver? For example, what if the car has the opportunity to swerve off the side of a mountain road and drop you 1000 feet onto some rocks to avoid a crash that would have killed far more people than simply you? Is my autonomous car required to act in my own best interest, or should it act in the best interests of everyone on the road?
Now this question I like, it's far more nuanced than the original one. I know I would buy a car with a bias towards keeping me alive (not at any cost) and that bias would likely get even stronger if I had family members in the car! But how plausibly can a car judge whether keeping me and my 2 year old infant alive is more or less important than the unknown occupants of another car?
Now a really difficult situation would be, what should the computer do if another car is going to crash but your car could minimise loss of life by doing something that would harm or kill you? In this situation your car isn't the cause of the accident, nor perhaps even would be involved. Should your car intervene,potentially killing you, for the good of society as a whole?
The simplest solution, and the one that I imagine most autonomous car manufacturers will take, is to avoid the question entirely.
When an accident is inevitable the car will simply try to stop as quickly as possible. It won't make any attempt to swerve or select a target. It's only consideration will be stopping the car as quickly as possible. It's a sound tactic from a legal point of view. Unless the car itself made a mistake leading to the accident any resulting injuries are someone else's fault.
Ethically stopping is the right thing to do too. The car can't predict other people's or other car's reactions. If it swerves towards them they might take evasive action as well, causing even more carnage. In the case of a choice between the driver's life and other people's lives it is almost certainly going to be the case that a human driver would have chosen themselves, and the accident was probably caused by the other people anyway (since autonomous cars drive very conservatively). It really is hard to imagine a situation where the car could be blamed for simply braking.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here's a variation on that theme which works for insurance but doesn't work for the best-protected-car scenario:
Swerve to hit the guy with less insurance, and charge the balance of the insurance payment after the shitty-insurance runs out to the car that was deliberately *not* hit in this scenario (this is assuming there wasn't a clear "fault" with one of the cars involved that would mean that guy gets the full charge).
Thus the safety-conscious car is strictly in a safer situation, and the monetary difficulty is no worse than a version that deliberately crashed into high-insurance cars and may be as little as nothing. In effect, instead of paying a lump sum to be made whole after an accident, the insurance pays a lump sum to avoid getting into an accident in the first place.
The car would of course make an online crosscheck to the economic value of the potential targets. And check their medical records in case somebody is terminally ill, you yourself included if a wall is an option too.
I, for one, would start car pooling with lots of small children inside. With a big enough critical mass of children I would even qualify for green lights, just for me!
That said, you can calculate how fast the politicians would add "features" (like with ISPs and mandatory website filtering) which would automatically upload a secret white lists and black lists into your car.
I am guessing here:
White list: Nobel prize winners, The Pope, politicians and multinational CEOs.
Black list: The no-fly list from the US.
I wonder if we would be allowed to make a personal priority list for your own car. For example, to take out mimes and lawyers first.