Ethical dilemmas may hold back self-driving vehicles

If it has to make a choice, will your autonomous car kill you or pedestrians on the street

The looming arrival of self-driving vehicles is likely to vastly reduce traffic fatalities, but also poses difficult moral dilemmas, researchers said in a study Thursday.

Autonomous driving systems will require programmers to develop algorithms to make critical decisions that are based more on ethics than technology, according to the study published in the journal Science.

“Figuring out how to build ethical autonomous machines is one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence today,” said the study by Jean-Francois Bonnefon of the Toulouse School of Economics, Azim Shariff of the University of Oregon and Iyad Rahwan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“For the time being, there seems to be no easy way to design algorithms that would reconcile moral values and personal self-interest — let alone account for different cultures with various moral attitudes regarding life-life tradeoffs — but public opinion and social pressure may very well shift as this conversation progresses.”

The researchers said adoption of autonomous vehicles offers many social benefits such as reducing air pollution and eliminating up to 90 per cent of traffic accidents.

“Not all crashes will be avoided, though, and some crashes will require AVs to make difficult ethical decisions in cases that involve unavoidable harm,” the researchers said in the study.

“For example, the AV may avoid harming several pedestrians by swerving and sacrificing a passerby, or the AV may be faced with the choice of sacrificing its own passenger to save one or more pedestrians.”

These dilemmas are “low-probability events” but programmers “must still include decision rules about what to do in such hypothetical situations”, the study said.

The researchers said they are keen to see adoption of self-driving technology because of major social benefits.

In a survey conducted by the researchers, 76 per cent of participants said that it would be more ethical for self-driving cars to sacrifice one passenger rather than kill 10 pedestrians. But, just 23 per cent said it would be preferable to sacrifice their passenger when only one pedestrian could be saved. And only 19 per cent they would buy a self-driving car if it meant a family member might be sacrificed for the greater good.