Away from Trolley Problems and Toward Risk Management
By Noah Goodall. 2016
96 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT As automated vehicles receive more attention from the media, there has been an equivalent increase in the coverage of the ethical choices a vehicle may be forced to make in certain crash situations with no clear safe outcome. Much of this coverage has focused on a philosophical thought experiment known as the “trolley problem,” and substituting an automated vehicle for the trolley and the car’s software for the bystander. While this is a stark and straightforward example of ethical decision making for an automated vehicle, it risks marginalizing the entire field if it is to become the only ethical problem in the public’s mind. In this chapter, I discuss the shortcomings of the trolley problem, and introduce more nuanced examples that involve crash risk and uncertainty. Risk management is introduced as an alternative approach, and its ethical dimensions are discussed.
Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research
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Citations in the corpus
- Ethical principles in machine learning and artificial intelligence: cases from the field and possible ways forward (2020, background): “This corresponds to a risk management situation by all means, with a number of nuances and inherent complexity (Goodall, 2016).”
- The Trolley, the Bull Bar, and Why Engineers Should Care About the Ethics of Autonomous Cars (2019, background): “Even if every action of an autonomous car is oriented toward minimizing the absolute risk of a crash, each action will also shift relative risk from one road user to another [7], [8].”