Ethical issues in focus by the autonomous vehicles industry

Abstract

The onset of autonomous driving has provided fertile ground for discussions about ethics in recent years. These discussions are heavily documented in the scientific literature and have mainly revolved around extreme traffic situations depicted as moral dilemmas, i.e. situations in which the autonomous vehicle (AV) is required to make a difficult moral choice. Quite surprisingly, little is known about the ethical issues in focus by the AV industry. General claims have been made about the struggles of companies regarding the ethical issues of AVs but these lack proper substantiation. As private companies are highly influential on the development and acceptance of AV technologies, a meaningful debate about the ethics of AVs should take into account the ethical issues prioritised by industry. In order to assess the awareness and engagement of industry on the ethics of AVs, we inspected the narratives in the official business and technical reports of companies with an AV testing permit in California. The findings of our literature and industry review suggest that: (i) given the plethora of ethical issues addressed in the reports, autonomous driving companies seem to be aware of and engaged in the ethics of autonomous driving technology; (ii) scientific literature and industry reports prioritise safety and cybersecurity; (iii) scientific and industry communities agree that AVs will not eliminate the risk of accidents; (iv) scientific literature on AV technology ethics is dominated by discussions about the trolley problem; (v) moral dilemmas resembling trolley cases are not addressed in industry reports but there are nuanced allusions that unravel underlying concerns about these extreme traffic situations; (vi) autonomous driving companies have different approaches with respect to the authority of remote operators; and (vii) companies seem invested in a lowest liability risk design strategy relying on rules and regulations, expedite investigations, and crash/collision avoidance algorithms.

Enabling Technologies for Urban Smart Mobility: Recent Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

“…The main concerns regard how AVs should behave in extreme traffic situations. In the literature, this is known as the trolley problem, first proposed in 1967, where a moral choice must be taken, and the AV should decide whether to kill five people by allowing the trolley to proceed, or kill "just" one person while stopping the trolley [95]. This issue has been deeply debated as the Moral Machine Experiment (MME), but there is still no solution.…”

Perspectives about artificial moral agents

“…To disentangle these sub-groups within AI Ethics would be a remarkable effort considering that Ethics scholars often write about various and overlapping topics. For instance, in recent years, the Autonomous Vehicle trolley problem has been addressed by a myriad of ethicists from different subgroups of Ethics [46]. By surveying a heterogeneous group of scholars, we aimed to reach scholars who have written about some but not all the particular topics surveyed, thus ensuring, along with the comments provided by participants about statements ranking highest and lowest, that this study goes beyond and adds value to published literature.…”

“…Looking forward, several domains for AMA implementation are frequently cited, including healthcare, military, and autonomous transport [24,46,56,77,78]. However, as it often happens with disrupting technologies, the ethics discussions about AMAs tend to be quite speculative.…”

“…Consequently, the practical discussions about the ethics of particular AI Systems are realized primarily in relation to the field affected, such as AI in healthcare or AI in transportation [46,51,59]. In these discussions, the ethics concerning the AI system is applied and shaped to the field in which it will operate and not the other way around.…”

A Methodological Review of fNIRS in Driving Research: Relevance to the Future of Autonomous Vehicles

“…The era of autonomous driving is upon us. While semi-autonomous cars or "SAE Level 2 Automation Systems" (SAE, 2018) have become visible on our roads (Martinho et al, 2021;Tan et al, 2021), higher order automated systems (i.e., SAE Level 3-5 Automation Systems) are being engineered and tested (see Figure 1). Among the many advantages automated FIGURE 1 | The future of automobile travel may remove control from the human driver all together, allowing drivers to become passengers who are able to engage in other, driving-unrelated tasks.…”