Driverless cars could offer governments new forms of control

Imagine a state-of-the-art driverless car zipping along a road with a disabled, 90-year-old passenger. The car must make a decision: drive into the mother and child and kill them, or swerve into a wall and kill the passenger. This is a variation of the trolley problem, a thought experiment which dominates academic and popular thinking about the ethics of driverless cars. The problem is that such debates not only dismiss the complexity of the system in which driverless cars will exist, but are also moral red herrings. The real ethical issues lie in the politics and power concerns with driverless cars.