Whose life should your car save?; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/20/16

Azim Shariff, Iyad Rahwan and Jean-Francois Bonnefon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Whose life should your car save?; Whose life should your car save? :

"The widespread use of self-driving cars promises to bring substantial benefits to transportation efficiency, public safety and personal well-being. Car manufacturers are working to overcome the remaining technical challenges that stand in the way of this future. Our research, however, shows that there is also an important ethical dilemma that must be solved before people will be comfortable trusting their lives to these cars.

As the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has noted, autonomous cars may find themselves in circumstances in which the car must choose between risks to its passengers and risks to a potentially greater number of pedestrians. Imagine a situation in which the car must either run off the road or plow through a large crowd of people: Whose risk should the car’s algorithm aim to minimize?

This dilemma was explored in studies that we recently published in the journal Science...

This is why, despite its mixed messages, Mercedes-Benz should be applauded for speaking out on the subject. The company acknowledges that to “clarify these issues of law and ethics in the long term will require broad international discourse.”"

In Albany, Those Who Might Address Ethics Meet Rarely and Offer Less; New York Times, 1/19/16

Vivian Yee, New York Times; In Albany, Those Who Might Address Ethics Meet Rarely and Offer Less:

"In the Senate, the Ethics Committee’s last recorded hearing came more than six years ago, in June 2009, when John L. Sampson was its chairman. Mr. Sampson, a Democrat from Brooklyn, is no longer the chairman, nor is he a senator: He was convicted last year of obstructing a federal investigation into whether he had embezzled state funds.

The committee has not even met as a group in at least several years, a hibernation that has lasted through Republican leadership, Democratic leadership, power-sharing leadership and more than a dozen scandals over lawmaker misbehavior.

“It is a body bent on self-protection,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, referring to the Legislature. “And so you have two different committees in two different houses bent on self-protection.”"