There advent of the concept of autonomous vehicles is very alluring to many. The idea that cars become robotic and time spent in frustration and boredom while commuting may become a thing of the past. There are however ethical issues at stake here.
The promise of the autonomous car is that there will be fewer collisions and fewer vehicular related deaths. Many cities like Las Vegas as experiencing a reduced number of accidents as more and more automated features are added to vehicles. Conversely, cars will go faster and drive closer to one another because all cars will be connected and have split second response times, faster than that of humans. However, whenever you mix humans into a mix with technology, many things can go wrong.
First, who makes decisions when an automated car has an ethical choice? For instance, a child loses her ball in the street and runs to get it. The car has three options: hit the child, hit a car nearby, or run into an oncoming car. In each case the probability of someone dying is well over fifty percent. Does the car purposely kill the driver because the driver is older and the child is younger? Does the car protect the driver as its main responsibility may be placed solely there? Is there a setting in the computer of the vehicle to to choose who to kill in such situations?
Another interesting question is that of mixing autonomous cars and non-autonomous cars. Can an autonomous car predict the behavior of a human driver? Can the reaction times of an autonomous vehicle overcome the unpredictability of a human driver?
These questions create a lot of debate as the transition to automated cars seems to be coming whether we want it or not. 66% of Americans are unsure of how autonomous vehicles will impact their lives. One key concern is that when there is an accident including an autonomous vehicle, how is fault assigned? Is the computer programmer at the car company to blame? No code is perfect because humans are involved. There will be hackers and tinkerers that disrupt normal behavior of autonomous cars.
As to liability, to date, according to Matthew L. Sharp Personal Injury Attorneys, all incidents today are faulted to the operator of the vehicle. At some point, as vehicle control is removed from the driver, liability will shift to the car makers. New prototype vehicles from major car manufacturers are already being displayed without steering control. The latest Mercedes Benz is one example.
Theoretically, in the future, no one will own cars. Each use of a vehicle will be a short term lease and the quality of the car will be chosen when leased. Once ordered with the destination in memory already, a driverless car will appear in your driveway for pickup. Once this occurs, the liability will be on the owner of the leasing company and will be included in the price. When this happens, very few human drivers will be left on the road and the number of accidents and vehicular related deaths will be very low.
Until then, however, we are just on the "bleeding edge" of the next evolution in cars and collision avoidance systems. The market is clearly moving in this direction and there will be fundamental shift in market behaviors and a significant reduction in accidents.
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