The ethics of automation
We’d do far
better to establish an ethical framework within which they must operate, than
force driverless cars to comply with human laws
All of a
sudden, so many of our appliances—televisions, coffee machines, bathroom scales,
light bulbs—have grown smart and integrated themselves into an enormous
hive-mind that miraculously keeps us fit, our home temperatures controlled and
our lives organised. It seems we are on the threshold of a new age, but even at
this early stage, the enormous strains that this fundamental technological
shift will place on the world, are already becoming visible. We are struggling
to deal with the vast amounts of data that our personal devices collect and its
impact on privacy. If you layer on top of that, artificial intelligence and
machines that are empowered to make our choices for us, the real impact
increases exponentially.
Nowhere is
this autonomy more evident than in the automobile industry. Google Cars have
been driving themselves around the Bay Area for years now and even though they
have been generally incident-free, stray accidents have caused disproportionate
anxiety. Wired magazine featured a story last year, in which two
engineers remotely gained access to a Jeep driving on the highway and shut the
engine down by hacking into its telemetry—a scary demonstration of the
additional risks that a connected future could offer. But it wasn’t until Tesla
released an over-the-air update that miraculously allowed its cars to
automagically park themselves, that the reality of connected driverless cars
really sank in.
Conventional
wisdom says we should regulate autonomous cars by seeing to it that they are
capable of complying with existing laws—ensuring that they are intelligent
enough to abide by traffic regulations and can stick to the speed limit. This
approach, in my opinion, is flawed. Our motor vehicles laws were designed to
guard against human failure—essentially, to protect us from ourselves. Laws
against drunk-driving, using cellphones and over-speeding exist solely to see
to it that when we take control of a powerful metal capsule capable of
travelling at insane speeds, we don’t end up killing ourselves. To regulate
intelligent, networked cars that are perfectly aware of each other’s location,
speed and direction under the same, essentially human framework is pointless.
Instead of
making autonomous cars behave more like us, what we should really be concerned
about is how these cars are programmed to make decisions. Whenever I think of
tough choices, I am reminded of Phillipa Foot’s ethics conundrum: the Trolley
Problem. It describes a situation in which a tramcar is rolling downhill
towards five people, tied to the tracks, unable to move and staring at certain
death. You can choose to switch the trolley to a siding but if you do so it
will run over an innocent by-stander. What do you do?
One approach
would be do what causes the least harm—switching the trolley to the siding
would kill one person instead of five. But would your decision be any different
if there was a child on the siding—and if so, how many adult lives is one
child’s worth? Isn’t there a moral difference between allowing people to die by
your inaction compared to wilfully switching tracks to cause the death of a
human being?
Autonomous
cars will be faced with decisions like these every day. And while a fallible
human at the switching yard can assuage his guilt by convincing himself that he
only had a split second to decide, autonomous cars will decide based on
pre-meditated risk-balancing programs, consciously designed by their
manufacturers. I wonder whether these moral choices should be left to corporate
whim. If we don’t intervene, our cars may end up being programmed to protect
their passengers at all costs—even at the cost of the lives of innocent
bystanders.
It is here I
believe legislators need to focus their efforts. Cars of the future will take
smarter decisions and will be able to based them on inputs from millions of
sensors—in their chassis, from the roads they drive on and the vehicles they
interact with. They will have the benefit of machine-to-machine communication,
AI and big data algorithms that will allow them to simulate millions of
potential outcomes in the time they need to take appropriate action. But even
with that kind of assistance, their choices will only be as sound as the
programmatic basis on which they are taken.
Car
manufacturers are already making these choices for us and will continue to
build programming into their vehicles. We’d do far better to establish an
ethical framework within which they must operate, than force autonomous cars to
comply with human laws.
If it were
left to me, I’d take the responsibility of regulating autonomous cars away from
the Motor Vehicles Authority and hand it off to the Ministry of Robotics.
Source | Mint – The Wall Street
Journal | 16 June 2016
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
Best Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA
National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL
2016) on April 23, 2016. The title of the paper is “Removing Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP
Treaty”
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