New study calls for 'urgent' debate over the ethics of autonomous vehicles

Self-driving vehicles have been proposed as a solution for the rapidly increasing number of fatal traffic accidents, which now claim a staggering 1.3 million casualties each year. While we have made strides in advancing self-driving technology, we have yet to explore at length how autonomous vehicles will be programmed to deal with situations that endanger human life, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. To understand how self-driving cars might make these judgments, the researchers looked at how humans deal with similar driving dilemmas. A study examining the ethics behind decisions self-driving cars make has found that the majority of people will not agree with guidelines drawn up by an ethics committee. When faced with driving dilemmas, people show a high willingness to sacrifice themselves for others, make decisions based on the victim's age and swerve onto sidewalks to minimize the number of lives lost. Ethical guidelines tend to disagree with human instincts in this case, which dictate that no life should be valued above another.