As society further integrates with technology it fast approaches a major milestone. In the near future the transportation industry will be turned into a fleet of self-driving cars. This potential future comes with certain hazards and obstacles that will need to be overcome before the industry is able to fully progress. Having a vehicle be able to drive itself creates scenarios where accidents may happen and as a result those accidents will have to be accounted for. Today’s laws do not adequately determine who would be at fault for such collisions, nor does it determine how much an individual or corporation should be liable for in case of an accident. In order for the industry to advance we as a society must determine what is acceptable ethically and then find a fair way of assessing penalties. There are two main issues that must be tackled in order to have adequate legal framework surrounding the issue of self-driving cars. The first is determining whether or not a self-driving car accident can be equated to the historical ethical paradox of the trolley problem. Once this question is answered it will be easier to determine how liability …show more content…
In trolley situation you have one individual acting upon what they believe is right. In reality the rules a self-driving car will be governed by will be determined by whole teams of qualified individuals. The truth is “the decision-making about self-driving cars is more realistically represented as being made by multiple stakeholders – for example, ordinary citizens, lawyers, ethicists, engineers, risk-assessment experts, car-manufacturers, etc. These stakeholders need to negotiate a mutually agreed-upon solution. And the agreed-upon solution needs to be reached in light of various different interests and values that the different stakeholders want to bring to bear on the decision” (Nyholm &
If an engineer makes a single mistake or does not do his job correctly then that could cost the lives of pedestrians and the safety of other cars on the road. In Joseph A. Dallegro’s article “ How Google’s Self-Driving Car Will Change Everything,” he claims, “... injured parties in a crash involving a self-driving car may choose to sue the vehicle's manufacturer, or the software company that designed the autonomous capability.” This goes to show that if one singular person makes a mistake, it could mean that multiple factors will be affected. However, this does not mean that all the blame should be put on the self-driving car, there is human error involved in there situations. Even if there is human error, the self-driving car can have mistakes throughout it if the maintenance of the car is not watched and cared for
Since the industrial revolution, the field of engineering has allowed society to flourish through the development of technological advances at an exponential rate. Similar to other professionals, engineers are tasked with making ethical decisions, especially during the production and distribution processes of new inventions. One field that has encountered ethical dilemmas since its inception is the automotive industry. Today, the dawn of the autonomous, self-driving, vehicle is upon us. In this new-age mode of transportation, humans will be less responsible for decisions made on the road. With the wide adoption of autonomous vehicles, there exist a possibility to reduce traffic-related accidents. Even though computers have the ability
If I was the programmer, I would instruct the vehicle to continue on its intended path, regardless of the situation. If, after making a turn, I noticed a group of people in the road, I would hope that the car would make an effort to stop. However, I would not allow the self-driving car to swerve into a wall or a sole pedestrian. By changing the path from which the car originally intended to go, you make the car become a leader in this situation, not just a bystander. In order to make the car swerve, it would need an external factor to deviate from the original design. This decision carries responsibility as well. There is a difference between the vehicle choosing to swerve into a wall and choosing to hit the group of people. In fact, the vehicle would not be choosing to hit the group of people at all, the group was in the vehicle’s way.
Have you ever feared that your loved one or even someone very close to you will be involved in a fatal car accident every time they left the house? Drunk driving is a factor in nearly one-third of all fatal accidents. Even if you aren’t the one driving, you are still at risk any moment to get involved in an accident that could’ve been prevented. By legalizing fully self-driving cars, we won’t have to fear the pain of losing a loved one. We could have a quick fix to all of this madness easily. The number of traffic accidents are soaring at 1.3 million deaths a year. Drunk Driving is still one of the number one causes of vehicle deaths; therefore, the government should allow self-driving cars to become legal to combat the issue. If we don’t act now to combat this issue we will have to deal with the consequences it will bring.
Who’s to blame when the vehicle gets in a severe car accident? Advances in technology, like self-driving cars, will be bad because it causes people to be lazy, it takes away the responsibility of the driver, it takes away the responsibility of the driver, and it can malfunction causing accidents.
Who fault is it when a driverless car gets into an accident? Google is the primary car and vehicle creators, and the government’s actions both in the U.S. and overseas are spending nearly billions of dollars to care the growth of the vehicle technology with the possible to make highway travel way more harmless than it is nowadays. How does someone apportion blame between a vehicle’s mechanical systems and an actual human driver? Is it the software the blame for the accident or was it the hardware? These sorts of problems have led to proposals that liability will be a problem when these driverless cars are released to the public.
There are a huge number of details that need to be worked out. My first thought is to go with the utilitarian approach and minimize the loss of life and save the greatest number of people, but upon farther reflection I started to see the problems with it. The utilitarian approach is too simplistic. It raised all kinds of questions such as will the computer make any decisions as to fault when it makes the decision on what to do. For example, if I am in the car with my young child, and three eighty-year-old drunks wander out in front of my car because they are drunk by their own choice, is the car going to choose them over me and my child because there are three of them? I would not want the computer to make that decision for me because frankly I probably would not make that decision. That kind of computer decision would probably curtail many people including me from buying a self-driving car. It is the same paradox that MIT Review refers to when it says, “People are in favor of cars that sacrifice the occupant to save other lives—as long as they don’t have to drive one themselves” (“Why
Self-driving cars are now hitting a few roadways in America, and are showing people just a small glimpse into what could be the future of automobiles. Although Google’s self-driving cars are getting a lot of attention now, the idea of a self-driving car has been around for quite a while actually. These cars have been tested to their limits, but the American people have yet to adopt the technology into their everyday lives. A brief description of their history, how they work, and finally answer the question, will self-driving cars ever be adopted widely by the American public?
Aristotle’s work, The Nicomachean Ethics, consists of numerous books pertaining to Aristotle’s Ethics—the ethics of the good life. The first book discloses Aristotle’s belief on moral philosophy and the correlation between virtue and happiness.
I do not understand how a driver, in this case Rafaela Vasquez, did not take control of the vehicle if she was seating behind a wheel and is obviously responsible in my opinion for this tragedy. The “safety driver” did not pay attention to the road as in the video it is showed that she was looking “down and to the side”, even though she said she was “alert” and there is nothing she could have done to avoid the accident. “It was believed that this is the first pedestrian death associated with self-driving technology”. The company has stopped the testing in different cities, unfortunately, technologies advances sometimes brings human casualties to the mix. Self-driving cars should regulate better the “safety drivers” maybe she was looking at her phone instead to pay attention to the
Finally, if an accident were to occur involving a self-driving car, the question of “who is responsible” is raised. This is a difficult question that needs to be addressed with laws that govern liability in these situations.
The term autonomous refers to the capability of acting independently, or having the freedom to do so. A self-driving car is an autonomous car, which has the ability to sense its environment and navigating without any human operations. These types of cars are built to make safe and smart decisions on the road. In the past years, automobile companies have begun to introduce advanced driver assistance systems that are capable of parking, switching lanes, and braking in case of an emergency on their own, without the driver’s assistance. Automated vehicles are capable of maneuvering through street traffic, as well as other natural and man-made obstacles along the way. Therefore, this technology might completely change the methods of transportation.
It might be hard to see where the self-driving car could have issues with safety but an interesting question arises when an accident is unavoidable. The question posed is “How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random?” (ArXiv). This is a very interesting question surrounding ethics. I’m not sure if there is a right answer to the question, which could stall the self-driving car industry. Before self-driving cars are mass produced a solution needs to be found to the question about unavoidable accidents. Although this question is a problem, there may not be a need to address the problem. It is said that “"driver error is believed to be the main reason behind over 90 percent of all crashes" with drunk driving, distracted drivers, failure to remain in one lane and falling to yield the right of way the main causes.” (Keating). Self-driving cars could eliminate those problems entirely and maybe with all cars on the road being self-driving cars, there would be no “unavoidable accidents”. Safety is the main issue the self-driving car is trying to solve in transportation and seems to do a good job at
In July 12, The New York Times reported a news: “Inside the self-driving Tesla fatal accident”, which again caused enormous debates on whether self-driving cars should be legal or not.
Self-driving cars are the wave of the future. There is much debate regarding the impact a self-driving car will have on our society and economy. Some experts believe fully autonomous vehicles will be on the road in the next 5-10 years (Anderson). This means a vehicle will be able to drive on the road without a driver or any passengers. Like any groundbreaking technology, there is a fear of the unforeseen problems. Therefore, there will need to be extensive testing before anyone can feel safe with a vehicle of this style on the road. It will also take time for this type of technology to become financially accessible to the masses, but again alike any technology with time it should be possible. Once the safety concern has been fully addressed