'THE EVERYDAY ETHICAL CHALLENGES OF SELF-DRIVING CARS'

THE EVERYDAY ETHICAL CHALLENGES OF SELF-DRIVING CARS

A lot of discussion and ethical thought about self-driving cars have focused on tragic dilemmas, like hypotheticals in which a car has to decide whether to run over a group of schoolchildren or plunge off a cliff, killing its own occupants(사용자). But those sorts of situations are extreme cases. As the most recent crash – in which a self-driving car killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona – demonstrates, the mundane, everyday situations at every crosswalk, turn and intersection present much harder and broader ethical quandaries(진퇴양 난).

Every day, mundane(재미없는, 일상적인) situations are surprisingly messy and complex, often in subtle ways.

Thinking through extreme situations and crash scenarios cannot help answer questions that arise in mundane situations. One could ask, what can be so hard about mundane traffic situations like approaching a crosswalk, driving through an intersection, or making a left turn. Even if visibility at the crosswalk is limited and it is sometimes hard to tell whether a nearby pedestrian actually wants to cross the street, drivers cope with this every day. But for self-driving

cars, such mundane situations pose a challenge in two ways.

First, there is the fact that what is easy for humans is often hard for machines. Whether it is recognizing faces or riding bicycles, we are good at perception and mechanical tasks because evolution built these skills for us. That, however, makes these skills hard to teach or engineer. This is known as “Moravec’s Paradox.” Second, in a future where all cars are self- driving cars, small changes to driving behavior would make a big difference in the aggregate(합계, 총액). Decisions made by engineers today, in other words, will determine not how one car drives but how all cars drive. Algorithms become policy.

The bigger question here is this: Given that self-driving cars are better than human drivers, why should the cars be subject to rules that were designed for human fallibility(오류 를 범하기 쉬운) and human errors? And to extend this thought experiment, consider also the more general question: If we, as a society, could design our traffic system from scratch, what would we want it to look like?