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

这个合作研究项目将研究与自动驾驶汽车（如自动驾驶汽车）有关的伦理问题，从编程选择到防止滥用。合作者包括工程师、哲学家和法律的专家。自动驾驶汽车开始出现，预计它们将解决许多问题，特别是交通事故和死亡。但它们不会是万无一失的，这意味着（就像任何其他技术一样）它们会受到错误、误用和失败的影响，有些设计可能比其他设计更好或更负责任。即使自动驾驶汽车每年可以挽救数千人的生命，行业和研究人员也没有因此而免除考虑造成不必要和错误死亡的道德，法律的和政策影响的义务。以这种方式失去生命可能会对新兴行业产生毁灭性的高调影响。该项目的成果将使工业界和学术界受益。可提供的资料包括一份公开报告、一本书、大学课程、会议演讲、学术和媒体出版物。除了自动驾驶行业，该项目还提供更广泛的机器人伦理和技术伦理方面的研究和材料，因为将伦理纳入工程和科学项目的压力越来越大。PI和他的团队将研究自动驾驶汽车可能涉及事故的不同方式，以及避免碰撞和碰撞优化选项，以减轻不可避免的碰撞所造成的伤害。他们还将研究各种道德框架的技术和政策可行性，以指导自动驾驶汽车的行动，方法是借鉴经典的道德困境，正在进行的技术道德工作，以及前线学术和工业实验室的真实的工程。他们还将关注更广泛的问题，例如自动汽车应如何处理医疗紧急情况、犯罪行为和其他常见情况。该项目符合NSF的使命，以及其NRI计划的研究呼吁，以更好地了解合作机器人的长期社会，行为和经济影响。由于自动驾驶汽车有望成为第一个大规模融入社会的机器人，它们将为整个社会或合作机器人行业定下基调。至关重要的是，在这些事态发展之前，必须让道德操守参与进来，以便在可能引起高度关注的事故发生之前考虑这些问题和情景。

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.