Autonomous Vehicles: Are They Safe, Moral?

Self-driving cars have been a reoccurring theme in 2014. From Google to Tesla, talk of a hands-off driving approach has generated a lot of interest. Paul Godsmark, co-founder of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence has said, “Every government department will be impacted by this technology: heath, education, tax revenues, pension plans. It’s absolutely transformational, a paradigm shift–the fact that a vehicle can drive itself.”

Experts tend to predict self-driving cars will hit the roads sometime between 2020 and 2030. However, reports by Google have indicated their self-driving car could it the road by 2017, however, that date is certainly not solid. What looks more predictable, however, is the financial impact of self-driving cars. Morgan Stanley has forecasted that $1.3 trillion dollars will be added to the U.S. economy with widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles. That includes money saved from reduced fuel consumption, accidents and a whopping $507 billion in productivity gains as people can work on the way to and from work, safely. Those numbers are of course, projections, but if the real numbers pan out to be similar, self-driving cars could truly be a huge boost to the economy. That is not to say that autonomous vehicles are not without controversy.

Much of the ado surrounding self-driving cars is a matter of public acceptance. Are they safe? How can one truly know? Will technology fail at the worst possible time? Who is liable in case of an accident and who will be blamed? An Asbury Park Press article tackled the subject of autonomous vehicle morals in a piece back on November 27th. It presented the following scenario: A self-driving car has a large truck suddenly veer into its lane. On the right is a man on a bicycle and on the left is a family on foot. What would the car do? How does a self-driving car make that decision? The judgment on behalf of the vehicle’s computer would have to be a predefined part of its programming.

Jeffrey Miller, a professor at USC, who develops driverless vehicle software, spoke to APP about this subject. He asked, “The problem is, who’s determining what we want? “You’re not going to have 100 percent buy-in that says, ‘Hit the guy on the right.’ For Google, the company who hopes to have self-driving vehicles on the road before anyone else, those questions are not yet answered. Ron Medford, Director of safety for Google’s self-driving car project explained, “People are philosophizing about it, but the question about real-world capability and real-world events that can affect us, we really haven’t studied that issue.” Eventually Google will need to make those choices, but how?

It’s a subject that Patrick Lin, a professor who directs ethics and emerging sciences group at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Lin said, “This is one of the most profoundly serious decisions we can make. Program a machine that can foreseeably lead to someone’s death. When we make programming decisions, we expect those to be as right as we can be.” Lin has worked with automakers BMW, Google, Tesla and Nissan to discuss the ethics behind self-driving vehicle technology. Of those, Lin told the AAP that only BMW has a specified group setup to explore that issue. Will autonomous vehicles only ever become like airplanes with a ready driver ready to take over the manual controls? Will they ever become widely accepted, or be shelved as a good idea that didn’t take off? What does the concept of a self-driving car mean to dealerships?