Should your driverless car kill you to save a child's life?

Should your driverless car kill you to save a child’s life?
Big decision for a small car. Credit: laughingsquid, CC BY-NC-ND

Robots have already taken over the world. It may not seem so because it hasn't happened in the way science fiction author Isaac Asmiov imagined it in his book I, Robot. City streets are not crowded by humanoid robots walking around just yet, but robots have been doing a lot of mundane work behind closed doors, which humans would rather avoid.

Their visibility is going to change swiftly though. Driverless cars are projected to appear on roads, and make moving from one point to another less cumbersome. Even though they won't be controlled by , the software that will run them raises many ethical challenges.


License to kill?


Both outcomes will certainly result in harm, and from an ethical perspective there is no "correct" answer to this dilemma. The tunnel problem serves as a good precisely because it is difficult to answer.



At first glance this second question – the who question – seems odd. Surely it is the designers' job to program the car to react this way or that? I am not so sure.


Allowing designers to pick the outcome of tunnel-like problems treats those dilemmas as if they must have a "right" answer that can be selected and applied in all similar situations. In reality they do not. Is it best for the car to always hit the child? Is it best for the car always to sacrifice the driver? If we strive for a one-size-fits-all solution, it can only be offered arbitrarily.


Ask the ethicist



From an ethical perspective, if we allow designers to choose how a car should react to a tunnel problem, we risk subjecting drivers to paternalism by design: cars will not respect drivers' autonomous preferences in those deeply personal moral situations.


As in healthcare, designers and engineers need to recognise the limits of their moral authority and find ways of accommodating user autonomy in difficult situations. Users must be allowed to make some tough decisions for themselves.


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Citation: Should your driverless car kill you to save a child's life? (2014, August 1) retrieved 31 March 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2014-08-driverless-car-child-life.html

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