Driverless cars raise so many ethical questions. Here are just a few of them.; San Diego Union-Tribune, March 23, 2018

Lawrence M. Hinman, San Diego Union-Tribune; Driverless cars raise so many ethical questions. Here are just a few of them.

"Even more troubling will be the algorithms themselves, even if the engineering works flawlessly. How are we going to program autonomous vehicles when they are faced with a choice among competing evils? Should they be programmed to harm or kill the smallest number of people, swerving to avoid hitting two people but unavoidably hitting one? (This is the famous “trolley problem” that has vexed philosophers and moral psychologists for over half a century.)

Should your car be programmed to avoid crashing into a group of schoolchildren, even if that means driving you off the side of a cliff? Most of us would opt for maximizing the number of lives saved, except when one of those lives belongs to us or our loved ones.

These are questions that take us to the heart of the moral life in a technological society. They are already part of a lively and nuanced discussion among philosophers, engineers, policy makers and technologists. It is a conversation to which the larger public should be invited.

The ethics of dealing with autonomous systems will be a central issue of the coming decades."