Ethical Decision Making during Automated Vehicle Crashes

By Noah Goodall. 2014

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Automated vehicles have received much attention recently, particularly the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Urban Challenge vehicles, Google's self-driving cars, and various others from auto manufacturers. These vehicles have the potential to reduce crashes and improve roadway efficiency significantly by automating the responsibilities of the driver. Still, automated vehicles are expected to crash occasionally, even when all sensors, vehicle control components, and algorithms function perfectly. If a human driver is unable to take control in time, a computer will be responsible for precrash behavior. Unlike other automated vehicles, such as aircraft, in which every collision is catastrophic, and unlike guided track systems, which can avoid collisions only in one dimension, automated roadway vehicles can predict various crash trajectory alternatives and select a path with the lowest damage or likelihood of collision. In some situations, the preferred path may be ambiguous. The study reported here investigated automated vehicle crashing and concluded the following: (a) automated vehicles would almost certainly crash, (b) an automated vehicle's decisions that preceded certain crashes had a moral component, and (c) there was no obvious way to encode complex human morals effectively in software. The paper presents a three-phase approach to develop ethical crashing algorithms; the approach consists of a rational approach, an artificial intelligence approach, and a natural language requirement. The phases are theoretical and should be implemented as the technology becomes available.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Safety Research, Social Psychology

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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): “Transportation Res Rec: J Transportation Res Board 2424:58–65 Goodall NJ (2016) Away from trolley problems and toward risk management.”
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].”
A Review of Motion Planning for Highway Autonomous Driving (2020, background): “Reference [198] proposes an ethical vehicle deployment strategy in a hybrid rational and AI approach, especially for critical safety situations.”