Death by Autonomous Vehicle — Moral Dilemma?
Just a year ago, Google’s sister company Waymo announced the successful completion of 16 million km driven on US public roads with its autonomous vehicles. Both, Korea and China, have launched gigantic local test sites for their self-driving vehicles. Even the British — mainly busy with their Brexit — have a lot to offer in terms of autonomous driving. In sum, almost every week a new success story from overseas appears on self-driving vehicles. And in Germany? Although 52 per cent of all global patents on automated driving come from Germany, it has become quiet since in August 2013 a Mercedes S-Class covered the legendary route of Bertha Benz autonomously.
A few autonomous minibuses have been tested on a German hospital campus and Daimler and BMW announced a joint venture to develop an automated driving platform by 2024. Everything else: DIESEL SCANDAL. What is being discussed heavily in Germany about autonomous vehicles, however, is the question of ethics.
Ultimately, a machine, or more precisely a programmer’s algorithm, would decide about life and death in a critical, unavoidable situation. But can a machine be trusted with life and death decision-making authority? Who is to be hit in an unavoidable collision? Is a young child to be treated differently than a senior citizen? Should the autonomous system decide to swerve into a light post, causing grave injury to the passenger, in order to avoid hitting a group of people at a bus stop? And if the driven person pays a supplement, can this decision be influenced in his favour?
The German soul is passionately heated by these moral questions. Survey platforms such as “moral machine” have been put in place to collect and analyze the publics’ opinion. Troves of experts have been interviewed, and a governmental ethics committee has filed a 36-page report on the issue. In the end, the German Federal Constitutional Court will likely be involved. No surprise that car manufacturers and IT giants prefer to keep their heads low to stay out of the line of fire.
“Automobiles are to be classed with ferocious animals and…the law relating to the duty of owners of such animals is to be applied.”
This kind of debate is not new. During the introduction of the car at the beginning of the 20th century, Georgia’s Court of Appeals in the U.S. stated that “automobiles are to be classed with ferocious animals and…the law relating to the duty of owners of such animals is to be applied…However, they are not to be classed with bad dogs, vicious bulls, evil-disposed mules, and the like.”
But is today’s mindset and position the same when it comes to the moral debate or are there geographical differences? Julien Fursat, Global Head of Product Design and Ecosystems at AXA puts it in a nutshell: “There is a serious distinction between US and EU traditional car manufacturers. US companies are looking for a functional, standalone autonomous car. In the EU they are looking for perfection, which requires interactions with the environment, i.e. connected roads, connected traffic lights etc. The second model is better in principle, but much more complex to implement. It’s a good illustration of the “engineer” mindset of occidental Europe, as opposed to the “business” mindset of the US.”
So in Germany, a lot of energy and effort is going into the ethics debate. Is it all just theoretical philosophizing and political pandering? Is history repeating itself?
Not quite. The fear to transfer the decision from human to machine paralyzes many, and it blocks the view on the essentials of the discussion. In Germany, there are more than 3,200 traffic deaths and over 390,000 traffic injuries every year. At least 90% are caused by human error. Only in a few cases, there was a situation though where the driver was able to consider an alternative decision between harm or death. And in all instances, the decision came within a millisecond from the spinal cord of a homo sapiens. By nature, not a reliable source of decision making and high moral quality.
The reality is that today people are hurting and killing other people with their cars. In the future, it looks like machines will take over and, in some cases, injure and kill people. However, much less frequently.
It is, therefore, an important but somewhat academic discussion, if and how machines should make a decision in life-relevant situations. Of course, the decision logic and competence of the computer for such rare situations must be clarified and defined: in advance, legally secure and done so by human professionals.
With automated driving systems, there’ll be much fewer fatalities and tragedies. An enlightened society should realize these benefits.
From a social and economic point of view, the benefit is clear. In the future, fewer people will be killed on the streets once the machine has fully taken control of the vehicle. Thus, many lives can be spared. Because the driverless car never gets tired nor irritated, not drunk nor excited, not distracted by phone calls, incoming messages or by make-up redo, and it never drives too fast or across red lights. So, there will certainly be fewer accidents, and the ones that remain will be less severe. The machine is, in that respect, better than the human.
But of course, each individual case remains a tragedy today as well as tomorrow. Whether it is the deceased child, the killed partner or the injured or disabled passenger. The suffering remains and will not be alleviated, whether caused by a machine or by man. However, with automated driving systems, there’ll be much fewer fatalities and tragedies. An enlightened society should realize these benefits. Therefore, we should not get distracted from the bigger picture by any individual accident of an autonomous car from Uber or Google going through the press.
Today, human drivers make decisions on the road that affect life and death. Tomorrow, these decisions will be made by machines, rationally, more secure and based on clear algorithms. That’s better for all of us. We should allow machines some learning time and tolerance to initial “faults”, even a few deadly ones. In return, we will be rewarded with more lives saved and fewer traffic accidents in the future. Thank you, machine.
Dr. Ingo Blöink is a thought leader, serial entrepreneur, management advisor and speaker on Future Mobility and Automotive Insurance. Prior he was European Director at Daimler Insurance and served as Member of the European Board of the Daimler Financial Services Captive. He has held various leadership positions focusing on Automotive and Mobility Solutions (e.g. car2go) including telematics, new transportation and connected cars. Prior to this, he worked in the Financial Services Practice of a management consultancy before becoming co-founder of a start-up company.
Ingo holds a Master Degree in Management and a doctorate (PhD) in Economics and Social Science. As an author of various publications on mobility and the future of insurance, he is a true believer in the Mobility Revolution and highly passionate about game-changers like autonomous driving and “flying cars“.
