THE FUTURE IS HERE

Self-Driving Cars: The Ethical Dilemma

Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets. Fully autonomous vehicles have the potential to benefit our world by increasing traffic efficiency, reducing pollution, and beyond all eliminating up to 90% of traffic accidents. Not all crashes will be avoided, though, and some crashes will require AVs to make difficult ethical decisions in cases that involve unavoidable harm. For example, the AV may avoid harming several pedestrians by swerving and sacrificing a passerby, or the AV may be faced with the choice of sacrificing its own passenger to save one or more pedestrians. What would you do in a situation like that? How can a person decide between two really bad options?

We will explore this disturbing ethical dilemma through Bentham and Kant’s philosophies and we will seek some insights on our true inner ethics by examining some of the scientific research on the topic.

In this video:
1. The Trolley problem 0:00
2. Autonomous vehicles – potential benefits and problems 0:53
3. Iyad Rahwan’s research: Bentham and Kant’s philosophies 2:27
4. Immersive virtual reality study 3:56
5. Problems with the “value of life” approach 4:54
6. The big questions ahead us 5:39

Interested in futuristically oriented content? Check our previous video exploring the question of whether we should expect mind blowing changes in the near future ( http://y2u.be/HfM5HXpfnJQ)

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Research and script: Irina Georgieva
Art, editing and narration: Daniel Stamenov

Music: Acoustic Breeze – Bensound.com

Further reading:

[1] Using Virtual Reality to assess ethical decisions in road traffic scenarios
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00122/full
[2] Why ethics matters for autonomous cars
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-48847-8_4/fulltext.html
[3] The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301293464_The_Social_Dilemma_of_Autonomous_Vehicles
[4] What moral decisions should driverless cars make – Iyad Rahwan TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/iyad_rahwan_what_moral_decisions_should_driverless_cars_make#t-803753
[5] To make us all safer, robocars will sometimes have to kill
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/make-us-safer-robocars-will-sometimes-kill/
[6] The Trolley dilemma and its variations
http://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-57111