The Ethics of Automated Vehicles: Why Self-driving Cars Should not Swerve in Dilemma Cases

Disarming the Trolley Problem – Why Self-driving Cars do not Need to Choose Whom to Kill

Many claim that the “Trolley problem” is hindering the introduction of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars must, as all safety-critical products, be designed such that the probability of morally hard (“trolley”) situations is acceptably low. In this paper we argue that the introduction of self-driving cars can solve this ethical dilemma. In short the solution to the trolley problem is that a s...

Self-Driving Cars

Machine Ethics and Automated Vehicles

Road vehicle travel at a reasonable speed involves some risk, even when using computer-controlled driving with failure-free hardware and perfect sensing. A fully-automated vehicle must continuously decide how to allocate this risk without a human driver’s oversight. These are ethical decisions, particularly in instances where an automated vehicle cannot avoid crashing. In this chapter, I introd...

Self-driving cars and data collection: Privacy perceptions of networked autonomous vehicles

Self-driving vehicles and other networked autonomous robots use sophisticated sensors to capture continuous data about the surrounding environment. In the public spaces where autonomous vehicles operate there is little reasonable expec­ tation of privacy and no notice or choice given, raising pri­ vacy questions. To improve the acceptance of networked au­ tonomous vehicles and to facilitate the...

Self-Driving Cars - An AI-Robotics Challenge

In recent years, all major automotive companies have launched initiatives towards cars that assist people in making driving decisions. The ultimate goal of all these efforts are cars that can drive themselves. The benefit of such a technology could be enormous. At present, some 42,000 people die every year in traffic accidents in the U.S., mostly because of human error. Self-driving cars could ...