Robin Marantz Henig’s article, Death by Robot, discussed the myriad of ethical dilemmas posed by those trying to blend the worlds of morality and humanity. Should Fabulon give their patient medicine to ease their suffering, even without permission? Should a military robot shoot someone because of the weapon it’s using, or because of what the person is wearing? Should a car on autopilot choose to hit another car or a pedestrian? The questions about self-driving cars seemed the most pressing because that technology was the closest to being actualized.
However, I think that the conflation of ethical dilemmas faced by humans and those faced by self-driving cars is inappropriate. Although John Seabrook’s personal story, Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91 shows just how much your brain slows down during a car accident, I think that the decisions a driver makes are mostly instinctual reactions to an unfamiliar situation. You have a split second to choose whether you’ll hit a barrier, a car, or even another person. Often, this probably isn’t even much of a choice, but more of a subconscious response where our own internal auto-pilots take over. This is much different than engineers or ethicists thinking about a hypothetical car crash and programming in a response. The difference is that the former is spontaneous while the other is predetermined. The former is somehow an easier decision to make and to live with than the latter.
In another vein, I wonder if cars were programmed to hit safer car models over less-safe ones, such as a Volvo instead of a Mini Cooper, if that would discourage people from buying the safer models. If safety turns you into a target in accidents, why not go with something that is objectively more vulnerable, but might be less prone to be hit in the long run?