Assignment task:
As you can see in this video, AVs have the potential to reduce traffic accidents significantly but, at the same time, AVs may occasionally face a moral dilemma.
Suppose your AV drives you on a local road, and suddenly a pedestrian rush into a crosswalk before you. It is too late to stop, and the algorithm of your AV should decide, such as whether to go ahead and run over pedestrians or risk the lives of the driver (and the passenger, if any) to save the pedestrians. Therefore, defining the algorithms that will enable AVs to make these ethical judgments should be a monumental task.
Now, let's assume you are the engineer who is supposed to develop an algorithm for such a moral dilemma. You have designed three options* as follows:
- Algorithm X: Your AV will always attempt to go ahead and run over (i.e., highly likely to kill) pedestrians in order to save the driver and passengers.
- Algorithm Y: To save pedestrians, your AV will always attempt to swerve and crash into a wall or tree (i.e., highly likely to kill the driver and passengers).
- Algorithm Z: Your AV will always attempt to save as many people as possible by instantly comparing the number of pedestrians and that of the driver and passengers of the AV.
Which do you want to select as the final algorithm to adopt for your AV? Why? Does libertarianism or the justice theory you learned today would support your conclusion? If not, how about utilitarianism or deontology, which you learned last week?