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A Framework for Human-Reason-Aligned Trajectory Evaluation in Automated Vehicles

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One major challenge for the adoption and acceptance of automated vehicles (AVs) is ensuring that they can make sound decisions in everyday situations that involve ethical tension. Much attention has focused on rare, high-stakes dilemmas such as trolley problems. Yet similar conflicts arise in routine driving when human considerations, such as legality, efficiency, and comfort, come into conflict. Current AV planning systems typically rely on rigid rules, which struggle to balance these competing considerations and often lead to behaviour that misaligns with human expectations. This paper introduces a reasons-based trajectory evaluation framework that operationalises the tracking condition of Meaningful Human Control (MHC). The framework represents human agents reasons (e.g., regulatory compliance) as quantifiable functions and evaluates how well candidate trajectories align with them. It assigns adjustable weights to agent priorities and includes a balance function to discourage excluding any agent. To demonstrate the approach, we use a real-world-inspired overtaking scenario, which highlights tensions between compliance, efficiency, and comfort. Our results show that different trajectories emerge as preferable depending on how agents reasons are weighted, and small shifts in priorities can lead to discrete changes in the selected action. This demonstrates that everyday ethical decisions in AV driving are highly sensitive to the weights assigned to the reasons of different human agents.


Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us

The New Yorker

Kant's life was famously dull, but he was less of a hermit than is often supposed.


The problem with wanting to reverse aging that no one talks about

#artificialintelligence

It was quite unlike any other acceptance speech of the UEFA President's award. In a rather philosophical address before the Champion's League draw in Monaco, former soccer player and actor Eric Cantona claimed: "Soon the science will not only be able to slow down the aging of the cells, soon the science will fix the cells to the state, and so we become eternal." But what was he actually talking about and does it hold up? In the context, the statement seemed out of place, perhaps even slightly mad. There's pathos in seeing aged sportsmen too--once sublime athletes now reduced to a snail's pace and going gray.


The Cognitive Processing of Causal Knowledge

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There is a brief description of the probabilistic causal graph model for representing, reasoning with, and learning causal structure using Bayesian networks. It is then argued that this model is closely related to how humans reason with and learn causal structure. It is shown that studies in psychology on discounting (reasoning concerning how the presence of one cause of an effect makes another cause less probable) support the hypothesis that humans reach the same judgments as algorithms for doing inference in Bayesian networks. Next, it is shown how studies by Piaget indicate that humans learn causal structure by observing the same independencies and dependencies as those used by certain algorithms for learning the structure of a Bayesian network. Based on this indication, a subjective definition of causality is forwarded. Finally, methods for further testing the accuracy of these claims are discussed.