Driverless Cars Offer New Forms Of Control – No Wonder Governments Are Keen

Imagine a state-of-the-art driverless car is 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 career into a wall and kill the passenger. This is a variation of the trolley problem, 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 really moral red herrings. The real ethical issues lie in the politics and power concerns with driverless cars.