Imagine a world in which cars can drive themselves. Once you step in and relax, the car takes you wherever you need to go. It sounds like a scene from a science fiction movie, doesn’t it? Surprisingly, though, the idea of driverless cars is not strange. We may start seeing self-driving cars on the road as early as 2025.
At first glance, automated cars seemed like a great new invention to me. For example, no longer we will have problems with drunk drivers. However, I soon realized that there is much more to this recent innovation than the evident conveniences. Driverless cars raise critical ethical issues that must be solved. Today I would like to address some of these issues.
Imagine a situation in which the car is driving and a girl and old person suddenly jumps out onto the street. The car has to choose to hit either the seven-year old girl to the left or the 70-year old grandmother to the right. What would be the ethically correct decision? Maybe the choice should be made based on age. The seven-year old girl should be saved since she has an entire life in front of her, whereas the grandmother is nearing the end of her life. Perhaps even the grandmother, if she were given the chance to choose, would insist on her own sacrifice. But if we add in the fact that the seven-year old girl was diagnosed with cancer, and the 70-year old grandmother has three young grandchildren to take care of, people’s opinions may vary over who to save. This example shows how different pieces of information about the pedestrians may completely change the car’s decision on who to save. The self-driving car would have to rank people’s lives in order of importance, but it would be impossible to come up with a set of standards that everyone would agree on. Moreover, the entire concept of comparing the value of people’s lives is unethical because no person’s life is more important than another’s. No one, and no thing, has the right to determine whether someone’s life should be more valued than another’s just based on a few standards.
There still remains many critical ethical issues that must be solved before we can see driverless cars on the road. Whether we want it or not, automated cars are becoming a reality and the technology is coming. How to solve these problems? Will automated cars ever be able to be on the road? We’ll just have to wait and see.
