Think inside the dilemma’s box
I just argued that we should avoid the tendency to be boxed in by an ethical dilemma, such as whether an autonomous car should sacrifice the passenger to save more pedestrians.
But we should equally avoid the tendency to dismiss the dilemma, by reading it too literally. Instead, we can benefit from forcing ourselves to imagine concrete realizations of the dilemma, as cartoonish and unrealistic as it might initially appear.
The dilemma has received its fair share of dismissal, with people arguing that it distracts from the real challenges, such as making sure the cars have good brakes. A famous roboticist that I highly admire once wrote “This is a made up question that will have no practical impact on any automobile or person for the foreseeable future.”
What these critics miss is that the AV dilemma is an abstraction, deliberately simplified to let you focus the discussion on specific factors. But this does not mean that the dilemma is nonexistent. In fact, it will be extremely common in its mundane form.
Consider the simple decision of where to position the car in the lane when a large truck appears to your side. It does not seem to be a decision of any moral consequence. However, if you drive and find yourself in that situation, you would probably instinctively veer a little away from the truck.
Now, suppose there is a bicycle lane on the other side of the lane. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this situation would not cause an instantaneous dilemma. However, if a million cars were programmed with the same behavior to veer away from the truck, then over millions of miles traveled, these cars may be more likely to collide with a bicycle than with a truck. We would only see this tradeoff play out in the accident statistics, assuming we had such fine-grained statistics. My collaborators and I have called this the ‘statistical trolley problem.’
References
Lin, P. Robot cars and fake ethical dilemmas. Forbes
Brooks, R. Unexpected Consequences of Self Driving Cars. Rodney Brooks: Robots, AI, and other stuff (2017).
Goodall, N. J. Ethical Decision Making During Automated Vehicle Crashes. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2424, 58–65 (2014)
Himmelreich, J. Never mind the trolley: The ethics of autonomous vehicles in mundane situations. Ethical Theory Moral Pract. 21, 669–684 (2018).
De Freitas, J. et al. From driverless dilemmas to more practical commonsense tests for automated vehicles. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 118, (2021).
Bonnefon, J.-F., Shariff, A. & Rahwan, I. The Trolley, The Bull Bar, and Why Engineers Should Care About The Ethics of Autonomous Cars [point of view]. Proc. IEEE 107, 502–504 (2019).