The Pros And Cons Of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are already cruising the real roads. However, before they can become widespread, car makers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality. In the academic article “Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics: Are We Ready for Utilitarian Cars?”, Jean-Francois Bonnefon, Azim Sharif, and Iyad Rahwan (2015), argue that the carmakers must adopt methods of experimental ethics for defining the algorithms that will dictate those cars’ behavior in situations of unavoidable harm.

Although autonomous vehicles guarantee all sorts of benefits, especially reducing traffic accidents, it will not cover them all. There will be unavoidable accidents. The question is how the AVs should act in those cases. One question

The majority believes that the car’s decisions should be guided according to three potentially incompatible objectives: being consistent most of the time, causing as less public outrage as possible, and not intimidate potential buyers.
Avoiding intimidation is a very important part, since no matter how beneficial the AVs are, if people are afraid to buy them because of their decisions, they will just keep driving in their manual cars, and all those benefits will be worth nothing. Causing as less public outrage as possible means that the public should not be surprised by the car’s actions in unavoidable accidents, but identify with it. The third objective, the decisions’ consistence, is the implementation of the other two combined.

Therefor, the suggestion in this article is to manufacture the AVs in a way people will accept its behaviour. This case is problematic since not everyone thinks the same and has the same moral values. There are experiments called trolley problems that investigates what will be the ultimate utilitarian decision in an unavoidable harm case, in which someone needs to choose between sacrificing one person’s life for saving several persons. The article’s research was created because those answers were not completely fitable to the AVs behaviour

The results of the first study show that people approve of sacrificing the AVs passenger in order to save pedestrians. In addition, the results show willingness to see this sacrificing legally enforced when the decision is made by the car than by a human driver. In the second study, participants have generally thought that the AVs should be programmed to save their passengers at all cost. This study has also shown that the participants generally supported others to buy cars that will be programmed to self-sacrifice, but when they were asked about themselves they were less willing to buy these cars. According to the survey's results, the authors suggest that the respondents accepted the idea that autonomous vehicles will be programmed to make moral decisions in situations where there is no choice and somebody will get hurt. Furthermore, they even praised the principle of self – sacrifice in order to save others’ lives. They reluctant for enforcing by law the self – sacrifice, but they will prefer to see such legal enforcement applied to AVs then if it applied to humans. Although the participants agreed that AVs should be programmed for self sacrifice for the greater good, they think that it would not be programmed that