proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks that has only one person on it, but that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one? First posed as a thought problem in a paper about the ethics of abortion by British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, it has led to endless philosophical discussions on the implications of choosing the lesser evil. 9 More recently it has been similarly framed for robot vehicles deciding between avoiding five schoolchildren who have run out onto the road when the only option is swerving onto the sidewalk to avoid them, thus killing a single adult bystander.
Software could generally be designed to choose the lesser evil; however, the framing of the question seems wrong on other levels. Because 90 percent of road accidents result from driver error, it is likely that a transition to autonomous vehicles will result in a dramatic drop in the overall number of injuries and deaths. So, clearly the greater good would be served even though there will still be a small number of accidents purely due to technological failures. In some respects, the automobile industry has already agreed with this logic. Air bags, for example, save more lives than are lost due to faulty air bag deployments.
Secondly, the narrow focus of the question ignores how autonomous vehicles will probably operate in the future, when it is highly likely that road workers, cops, emergency vehicles, cars, pedestrians, and cyclists will electronically signal their presence to each other, a feature that even without complete automation should dramatically increase safety. A technology known as V2X that continuously transmits the location of nearby vehicles to each other is now being tested globally. In the future, even schoolchildren will be carrying sensors to alert cars to their presence and reduce the chance of an accident.
It’s puzzling, then, that the philosophers generally don’t explore the trolley problem from the point of view of the greater good, but rather as an artifact of individual choice. Certainly it would be an individual tragedy if the technology fails—and of course it will fail. Systems that improve the overall safety of transportation seem vital, even if they aren’t perfect. The more interesting philosophical conundrum is over the economic, social, and even cultural consequences of taking humans out of the loop in driving. More than 34,000 people died in 2013 in the United States in automobile accidents, and 2.36 million were injured. Balance that against the 3.8 million people who earned a living by driving commercially in the United States in 2012. 10 Driverless cars and trucks would potentially displace many if not most of those jobs as they emerge during the next two decades.
Indeed, the question is more nuanced than one narrowly posed as a choice of saving lives or jobs. When Doug Engelbart gave what would later be billed as “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968—a demonstration of the technologies that would lead to personal computing and the Internet—he implicitly adopted the metaphor of driving. He sat at a keyboard and a display and showed how graphical interactive computing could be used to control computing and “drive” through what would become known as cyberspace. The human was very much in control in this model of intelligence augmentation. Driving was the original metaphor for interactive computing, but today Google’s vision has changed the metaphor. The new analogy will be closer to traveling in an elevator or a train without human intervention. In Google’s world you will press a button and be taken to your destination. This conception of transportation undermines several notions that are deeply ingrained in American culture. In the last century the car became synonymous with the American ideal of freedom and independence. That era is now
Software could generally be designed to choose the lesser evil; however, the framing of the question seems wrong on other levels. Because 90 percent of road accidents result from driver error, it is likely that a transition to autonomous vehicles will result in a dramatic drop in the overall number of injuries and deaths. So, clearly the greater good would be served even though there will still be a small number of accidents purely due to technological failures. In some respects, the automobile industry has already agreed with this logic. Air bags, for example, save more lives than are lost due to faulty air bag deployments.
Secondly, the narrow focus of the question ignores how autonomous vehicles will probably operate in the future, when it is highly likely that road workers, cops, emergency vehicles, cars, pedestrians, and cyclists will electronically signal their presence to each other, a feature that even without complete automation should dramatically increase safety. A technology known as V2X that continuously transmits the location of nearby vehicles to each other is now being tested globally. In the future, even schoolchildren will be carrying sensors to alert cars to their presence and reduce the chance of an accident.
It’s puzzling, then, that the philosophers generally don’t explore the trolley problem from the point of view of the greater good, but rather as an artifact of individual choice. Certainly it would be an individual tragedy if the technology fails—and of course it will fail. Systems that improve the overall safety of transportation seem vital, even if they aren’t perfect. The more interesting philosophical conundrum is over the economic, social, and even cultural consequences of taking humans out of the loop in driving. More than 34,000 people died in 2013 in the United States in automobile accidents, and 2.36 million were injured. Balance that against the 3.8 million people who earned a living by driving commercially in the United States in 2012. 10 Driverless cars and trucks would potentially displace many if not most of those jobs as they emerge during the next two decades.
Indeed, the question is more nuanced than one narrowly posed as a choice of saving lives or jobs. When Doug Engelbart gave what would later be billed as “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968—a demonstration of the technologies that would lead to personal computing and the Internet—he implicitly adopted the metaphor of driving. He sat at a keyboard and a display and showed how graphical interactive computing could be used to control computing and “drive” through what would become known as cyberspace. The human was very much in control in this model of intelligence augmentation. Driving was the original metaphor for interactive computing, but today Google’s vision has changed the metaphor. The new analogy will be closer to traveling in an elevator or a train without human intervention. In Google’s world you will press a button and be taken to your destination. This conception of transportation undermines several notions that are deeply ingrained in American culture. In the last century the car became synonymous with the American ideal of freedom and independence. That era is now
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