There was a really fascinating editorial at Wired
about self-driving cars and liability. I
know, I know – that sounds like a pretty boring topic. But read on.
One of the problems with self-driving cars is not the
engineering but the liability. If your
self-driving car is about to hit five people who jumped out into the road,
should it swerve and hit a single person instead? You might think that hitting one person is
better than hitting five. But you also
might think that swerving into someone is an intentional act and therefore
worse. This example is based on the
famous trolley problem that I have written about before. So which should the car do? And could the person/people who get hit sue
because someone consciously made the choice to program the car that way?
But this is where the editorial gets interesting. You can imagine a whole bunch of options for the
car. Should it decide based on some
characteristics of the people? Maybe
swerving into an adult is preferred to hitting the group of five, but swerving
into a child is not? But of course this
gives us the slippery slope. What if it
swerves into males but not females?
Obese smokers but not healthy marathon runners? What if it swerves into gas-guzzling SUVs,
but not Priuses?
To offload these tough questions, what if the car lets you set
your preferences yourself? Would you
allow each driver to decide? Maybe Joe
would choose to hit three obese female Muslims over five Christian disabled
veterans, but not if they are undocumented immigrants. And Mary would swerve into a Prius if the three
passengers aren’t wearing seatbelts and two are texting over the SUV with five teenagers
with a blood alcohol level of 0.07 but attending an Ivy League college. But now who gets sued, you or the car maker?
But if you think that this is all ridiculous and that the
car shouldn’t be making these decisions at all, you are still choosing. If the car doesn’t swerve, then you have
chosen to hit the group of five. If the
car does swerve than you have chosen to hit the one. It’s still a choice.
