The crisis of opioid use, abuse, addiction, and subsequent overdose deaths has reached epidemic proportions in America with no clear end in sight. As of March 2018, the National Institutes of Health reported that more than 115 Americans per day are dying as a direct result of opioid overdoses. In late 2017, it was reported that the US life expectancy had dropped for a second consecutive year, due in part to a surge in fatal opioid overdoses. For perspective, US life expectancy had not dropped for a single year since 1993, which at the time was a direct result of the AIDS epidemic, and had not dropped for consecutive years since the 1960s. Further, the CDC has estimated that as a result of only prescription opioid abuse, the total yearly economic burden to the United States totaled upwards of $78.5 billion--including the costs of health care, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and involvement of the criminal justice system--and clearly this shocking figure excludes the abuse of illicit opioids, such as heroin.

Recently, the "trolley problem," a decades-old thought experiment in moral philosophy, has been enjoying a second career of sorts, appearing in nightmare visions of a future in which cars make life-and-death decisions for us. Among many driverless car experts, however, talk of trolleys is très gauche. They call the trolley problem sensationalist and irrelevant. But this attitude is unfortunate. Thanks to the arrival of autonomous vehicles, the trolley problem will be answered--that much is unavoidable.

A recent survey shows that people want self-driving cars to be programmed to minimize casualties during a crash, even if it causes the death of the rider. Trouble is, the same survey shows that people don't actually want to ride in cars that are programmed this way. That's obviously a problem--and we're going to have to get over it. These are the kinds of thought experiments that are taught to Ethics 101 students during the first weeks of class--but now they're actually being applied to real life. Similar to the vexing trolley problem, manufacturers are struggling to come up with new rules for autonomous vehicles to guide them when a crash is inevitable, and the lives of people, both inside and outside of the car, are at stake.