Top Safety Official Doesn’t Trust Automakers to Teach Ethics to Self-Driving Cars; MIT Technology Review, 9/2/16

Andrew Rosenblum, MIT Technology Review; Top Safety Official Doesn’t Trust Automakers to Teach Ethics to Self-Driving Cars:

"Rapid progress on autonomous driving has led to concerns that future vehicles will have to make ethical choices, for example whether to swerve to avoid a crash if it would cause serious harm to people outside the vehicle.

Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, is one of them. He told MIT Technology Review that federal regulations will be required to set the basic morals of autonomous vehicles, as well as safety standards for how reliable they must be...

Hart also said there would need to be rules for how ethical prerogatives are encoded into software. He gave the example of a self-driving car faced with a decision between a potentially fatal collision with an out-of-control truck or heading up on the sidewalk and hitting pedestrians. “That to me is going to take a federal government response to address,” said Hart. “Those kinds of ethical choices will be inevitable.”

That NHTSA has been evaluating how it will regulate driverless cars for the past eight months, and will release guidance in the near future. The agency hasn't so far discussed ethical concerns about automated driving.

What regulation exists for self-driving cars comes from states such as California, and is targeted at the prototype vehicles being tested by companies such as Alphabet and Uber."