NRI: RUI: Autonomous Vehicles: Ethics, Design, and Risk

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This collaborative research project will examine ethical issues that arise in connection with autonomous vehicles (such as self-driving cars), from programming choices to guarding against abuse. Collaborators include engineers, philosophers, and legal experts. Autonomous vehicles are starting to emerge, and they are predicted to solve a lot of problems, especially traffic accidents and fatalities. But they will not be foolproof, meaning that (just like any other technology) they will be subject to error, misuse, and failure, and some designs may be better or more responsible than others. Even if autonomous vehicles can save thousands of lives each year, industry and researchers are not thereby released from the obligation to consider ethical, legal, and policy implications of the bringing about of unnecessary and wrongful deaths. The loss of lives in this way could have a devastating, high profile effect on the nascent industry. The results of this project will benefit both industry and the academia. Deliverables will include a public report, a book, university-level courses, conference talks, and academic as well as media publications. Beyond the autonomous driving industry, this project provides research and materials in robot ethics and technology ethics more broadly, as pressure mounts to integrate ethics into engineering and science programs.The PI and his team will examine the different ways that an autonomous vehicle could be involved in an accident, as well as crash-avoidance and crash-optimization options to mitigate the harm that occurs in unavoidable crashes. They will also investigate the technical and policy feasibility of various ethical frameworks to guide actions by autonomous vehicles by drawing from classical dilemmas in ethics, ongoing work in technology ethics, and real engineering in academic and industry labs on the front lines. They will also attend to broader issues, such as how autonomous cars should handle medical emergencies, criminal conduct, and other common situations. The project is aligned with the NSF's mission, as well as the call of its NRI program for research to gain a better understanding of the long-term social, behavioral and economic implications of co-robots. Because autonomous vehicles are poised to be the first robots to be integrated with society on a large scale, they will set the tone for the entire social or co-robotics industry. It is crucially important to engage ethics ahead of these developments to consider the issues and scenarios in advance of potentially high-profile accidents.