Autonomous Vehicles raise Ethical challenges
AVs struggle to identify humans with dark skin tone¹ alongside the vehicle or walking in front of them. This could lead to situations where they fail to see police officers, pedestrians, or workers on the side of construction zones giving instructions. AVs have a tough time in bad weather conditions in which an entire array of problems are created for the algorithms to solve.
So far, there are no unified ethical standards and certifications² for AVs. The big Moral Machine study³ conducted by MIT showed that it’s hard to identify universal ethical values. The moral choices that people made in the MIT survey were different and varied, even at a local level. That’s why it’s hard to create universal ethics of AVs that won’t be controversial. In June 2017, the German Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure developed the world’s first ethical guidelines for AVs⁴. According to these guidelines, the protection of human life comes first.
The following describes some of the ethical challenges:
Jobs
While AVs will create jobs in engineering and customer service⁵ ⁶, many driver jobs could be lost as there won’t be any need for drivers. More than 3 million taxi, truck, and bus drivers may lose their livelihoods and professions in the U.S.⁷. As the accidents decrease due to AVs (95% of recent accidents are due to human error⁸), the importance of vehicle insurance might decrease. Also, people working in collision repair centers and chiropractic care centers might lose jobs. People might opt for autonomous ride-shares compared to public transit services⁹ because of the cheaper prices offered by autonomous ride-shares, which will impact the jobs in public transit services.
Critical Event Management
In an AV, humans will have limited control over the behavior of the vehicle. But, if something goes wrong, according to the Moral Crumple Zones concept¹⁰, responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor, who had limited control over the behavior of an AV system. The Arizona Uber accident was attributed to a human action¹¹ initially, but the later report by NTSB mentioned that the software failed¹². Humans bear the brunt of moral and legal responsibilities when the AV system malfunctions.
Quality of vehicle sensors
Sensors are one of the costly components in AVs. High-end sensors increase the cost drastically. If the vehicle purchase price increases beyond a specific limit in certain countries, there won’t be incentives from the local government to the vehicle owners. To minimize the cost, vehicle manufacturers might not use all the required sensors¹³ at the expense of increased risk to human beings.
Algorithms
The algorithms used in the AV’s decision-making process present potential safety risks to passengers and those in the vehicle’s vicinity. Unlike human drivers who make real-time decisions while driving, an AV’s decision, although based on various inputs available from sensor data, results from logic developed and coded by a programmer ahead of time.
Environment impact
AV manufacturers make trade-offs between mobility and environmental impacts¹⁴. Changes in computer-controlled acceleration, cornering, and braking can have effects on energy use and pollution emissions. Electricity to recharge AV batteries relies on conventional power grids. Battery units also require mining elements such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, or graphite, contributing to pollution.
References
[2] https://www.intellias.com/a-farewell-to-current-automotive-certifications/
[3] http://moralmachine.mit.edu/
[4] https://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/EN/Documents/G/ethic-commission-report.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
[6] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181029-driving-your-career-towards-a-boom-sector
[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/goldman-sachs-analysis-of-autonomous-vehicle-job-loss.html
[8] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812115
[10] https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2019.260
[12] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-weredisabled-
[13] https://apnews.com/article/714640aa989846c5bd32cfd12b0e3b9d
[14] https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190652951.003.0002
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