Self-driving automobiles, legal and ethical considerations
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help - Ronald Reagan
In the fourth blog post, I will explore some of the legal and ethical issues involved with the evolution of self-driving automobiles. My classmates and few others who I have had a chance to discuss this topic with, invariably are concerned with the safety aspects, and rightly so. As described in first blog post safety is of primary importance and this is the crux of this post.
Although self-driving cars promises to be more reliable and safe, it might take many years before delivering on that promise. Few months ago, a Tesla car was involved in car accident which killed a man from Florida. The accident occurred when the car was in Autonomous mode. In another incident, a Google self-driving car was damaged recently by a commercial van running a red light.
Apart from physical safety, hacking and other privacy issues should also be considered. Cyber threat is already a big issue faced by companies, governments and individuals. Connected cars and self-driving cars just like laptops and phones are driven by software, which will have bugs and even few zero-day exploits.
It is impossible to build a robust, fool proof connected software which can’t be hacked.
Similar to every other software updates, a self-driving car’s software update might introduce a bug which can be exploited by hackers for fun or even people with ill intentions. This is a plausible scenario. So having systems with checks and balances in place is crucial as more of these cars start appearing on the road.
For auto-manufactures, these challenges pose legal hurdles. They need to follow safety measures set by regulatory authorities. Additionally, auto-makers need to work with regulatory authorities to bring effective regulations based on the consumption model.
Manufactures such as Volvo, General Motors and Mahindra have started to partner with ride sharing services like Uber, Lyft and Ola. Telsa predicts to have a ‘shared autonomous fleet’, where individuals can loan their cars while they are not using them. In such a complicated scenario there is a necessity for clear regulations to clarify ownership in case of a crash.
Last week’s reading on data access issues in online platforms raises questions which are relevant and applicable. At present Tesla, Uber and Google’s services don’t share data which is collected by their self-driving cars. They might not share a common approach or similar technologies to solve this problem but sharing data on crash scenarios and other technical challenges might improve the safety of self-driving cars.
However, this is unlikely and disparate approaches might mean one company could be more efficient than other in few scenarios rather than producing comprehensive solutions.
Governments cannot take a laissez-faire attitude in this issue. Having a legislation which can be swiftly updated along with the introduction of new technology means there is accountability for automakers when building these cars and technology. Even when things go wrong there is a clear path to pursue rather than a murky one which could add to the complexity.
So, governments could even create agencies akin to civil aviation authority to deal with accident and incident investigations, which could be collated and translated into industry wide standards.
Finally, self-driving cars raises ethical questions which are not so straight forward to tackle. Hypothetically, if a self-driving car need to decide between two deadly options it could be programmed to cause less casualties but it might not be a big selling point for manufacturers.
Interestingly, a study on the social dilemma of autonomous vehicles points out the contradiction. Respondents wanted autonomous car to choose greater good in deadly scenarios but personally would prefer to ride in a car that protects its passengers. Majority of the respondents didn’t prefer to buy an autonomous car if regulations forced manufacturers to program greater good.
As an optimist, I hope self-driving cars would avoid getting into such deadly situations in the first place.
Here’s a short clip on social dilemma of autonomous vehicles
