Should We Give Up Control and Let Our Cars Drive Us?

by Natalie Shoemaker

Driverless cars require trust, trust in the programmer's efforts to write-in a number of situations, allowing the car to adapt. This requires us to give up control, says Jerry Kaplan, a Fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, which many of us aren't readily willing to hand over. Kaplan asks us to consider the number of social interactions and ethical scenarios we're handing over to a self-driving car, proposing the “Trolley Problem” as one of his main concerns:



Brad Templeton is well aware of the proposed “Trolley Problem,” and asks people to consider real life. “In reality, such choices are extremely rare,” he writes in his blog. “How often have you had to make such a decision, or heard of somebody making one? Ideal handling of such situations is difficult to decide, but there are many other issues to decide as well.”

This ethical dilemma seems small when pitted up against the overwhelming amount of good autonomous vehicles could do. More efficient driving means lower carbon emissions. It could also prevent many accidents, as causes leading up to a crash are mostly attributed to human error. In a 2008 report, the National Highway and Traffic Association found “the critical reason for the critical pre-crash event was attributed to the driver in a large proportion of the crashes. Many of these critical reasons included a failure to correctly recognize the situation (recognition errors), poor driving decisions (decision errors), or driver performance errors.”

Engineers are aware of the scenarios and have been working on solving a multitude of them for decades, Templeton assures.

“It’s extremely rare for a newcomer to come up with a scenario they have not thought of,” he wrote in another post. “In addition, developers are putting cars on the road, with over a million miles in Google’s case, to find the situations that they didn’t think of just by thinking and driving themselves.”

But even knowing all this people still dwell on the scenarios computers won't be able to figure out—we still vie for the option of control. The proposed solution is the car handing over control to a human when it encounters unknowns. Jack Stewart from the BBC met with Dr. Anuj K. Pradhan at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute to see how this hand over would work in a simulation.

Pradhan explained the simulation is meant to test two things: seeing how people react to being inside an autonomous car and how well they respond when a situation does elevate to a point beyond what the vehicle can understand.

Stewart writes “when a computer voice shouts 'autonomous mode disengaged' and you look up to see the back of a truck that you are hurtling towards at high speed. Maybe you will be able to respond quickly enough, but maybe not. You are at a disadvantage. From BBC Future's experience in the simulator, and in other experimental autonomous vehicles such as Google’s cars, it is pretty easy to become relatively relaxed.”

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Staff