Publication Date
10-1-2021
Abstract
When designing software for self-driving cars, we need to make an important decision: When a self-driving car encounters an emergency situation in which either the car's passenger or an innocent pedestrian have a good change of being injured or even die, which option should it choose? This has been a subject of many years of ethical discussions -- and these discussions have not yet led to a convincing solution. In this paper, we propose a "conservative" (status quo) solution that does not require making new ethical decisions -- namely, we propose to limit both the risks to passengers and risks to pedestrians to their current levels, levels that exist now and are therefore acceptable to the society.
Comments
Technical Report: UTEP-CS-21-86