Autonomous Car Collisions Pose Live or Die Ethical Questions
With all the buzz about autonomous cars coming to Canada, questions still remain about how they’ll make decisions in life or death situations.
If faced with an inevitably fatal collision, will the car be programmed to save its occupants or sacrifice them for the greater good of sparing school children crossing the road?
These are questions that Azim Shariff, a researcher at University of Oregon's Culture and Morality Lab, are trying to answer.
"There's this trade-off between the interests of the driver, or rather the passenger who buys the car, and the level of public acceptance versus public outrage," Shariff stated.
Along with other researchers from France and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shariff will be testing public attitudes on the decisions that self-driving cars will be making in these situations.
They created various scenarios and asked people to decide how they felt about the outcome.
One of these involved a driverless car having to decide between saving the occupants of the vehicle and pedestrians crossing the road.
The number of pedestrians changed as did the vantage point of the person judging the scenario, from being in the vehicle, one of the pedestrians, or a casual observer.
Most participants, in principle, went with saving the greatest numbers of people.
"People do generally — at least they say that they'd be willing to go with the more utilitarian option," Shariff says. "That's especially the case when they're going to be the pedestrians. So they don't want these cars to be willing to drive over 10 people."
However, these numbers did change when the participant was asked to envision themselves as behind the wheel in this scenario.
About 25 per cent stated they would want the vehicle to save them at all costs in a collision, including the deaths of pedestrians.
With driverless cars being tested for Canadian roads as early as January 2016, these questions are still being debated.
Auto makers are still in the process of deciding how best to handle to the questions and the ethics paper will encourage those discussions.
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