There's Still Work to Do Addressing Ethics in Autonomous Vehicles

There's a fairly large flaw in the way that programmers are currently addressing ethical concerns related to artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Namely, existing approaches don't account for the fact that people might try to use the AVs to do something bad. For example, imagine that there is an autonomous vehicle with no passengers and it is about to crash into a car containing five people. It can avoid the collision by swerving out of the road, but it would then hit a pedestrian. Most discussions of ethics in this scenario focus on whether the autonomous vehicle's AI should be selfish (protecting the vehicle and its cargo) or utilitarian (choosing the action that harms the fewest people). But that either/or approach to ethics can raise problems of its own, according to Veljko Dubljević, an assistant professor in the Science, Technology & Society program at North Carolina State University.