The moral dilemmas of programming the self-driving car
October 29, 2015
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The moment I heard they were perfecting the self-driving car, it gave me very serious pause.
Maybe that's because in some essential way I don't trust handing over the decision-making process to a machine, even though I don't like driving all that much and even though the evidence is that self-driving cars would almost certainly result in fewer accidents and fewer deaths overall. There's just something very basic about the thechnology that I don't trust, and it may be the very same very basic thing in me that makes me especially concerned with protecting liberty and autonomy.
But I hadn't spent all that much time thinking about the details. It turns out others have---they must, if they're going to program these cars. And it's no surprise that there are some knotty ethical problems involved.
Here's one hypothetical: