Following is my argument in response to the above questions:
There’s an undefined number of cases that may arise abruptly during the journey of an autonomous vehicle that require an immediate decision to minimize casualties. Hence, the problem is not just about how to program the vehicle to handle a few scenarios which represent ethical dilemmas. It’s about other scenarios which the vehicle hasn’t been programmed to respond to adequately, a severe limitation of an AI system which is incapable of adapting to new unplanned situations.
This applies also to the case of meta-learning, described as learning to learn, where the model is trained on a wide array of tasks with the aim of determining common patterns among these tasks to be ready to perform well with new tasks. Therefore, the response of the vehicle will be limited according to the finite number of tasks it has been trained on making it unable to encounter all possible variations of real world cases where lives might be at risk.
Accordingly, reaching solutions to such ethical dilemmas could end up to be just practicing mind sports. Moreover, developing sensors with higher efficiency would just allow for collecting more accurate data while the problem is about making a correct and timely decision based on these data in such unexpected situations. Finally, based on the previous discussion, in the case of an accident, the responsibility lies on the entities or legislations which allowed such limited systems to tackle such situations without ensuring proper human supervision.
Ethical dilemmas in autonomous vehicles are undoubtedly a major challenge, but the fundamental question remains: should a machine be allowed to decide over human lives? One human life cannot be weighed against another – every life is equal and cannot be quantified.
A fitting comparison here is the play Terror by Ferdinand von Schirach. In this play, the audience is asked to decide whether a fighter jet pilot who has shot down a hijacked passenger plane in order to save many other lives is guilty or not. It is about the question of whether a person has the right to actively decide over life and death – a moral dilemma that also arises with autonomous vehicles.
If an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident in which a decision has to be made between different lives, it must not be programmed to weigh one human being against another. That would be a utilitarian logic that cannot be ethically justified. Rather, the technology should focus on avoiding accidents in the first place, rather than making a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ decision about human lives.
Ultimately, the responsibility remains with the human being – be it the developer, the manufacturer or the society that regulates such technologies. An autonomous vehicle must not become an instance that offsets one life against another, but must focus on safety mechanisms that minimise the risk for everyone without consciously choosing victims.
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