Michael R. Strain, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, imagines this scenario. At 4 a.m. on a workday, his bedroom quietly detaches from his house, deploys wheels, and begins the three-hour commute to his office in downtown Washington, DC. At 6 a.m. his alarm goes off, and he gets ready for work. His bedroom parks itself in a garage under his office building, and he’s at his desk by 7.
The self-driving bedroom may be farfetched, but Strain recounts being at a recent conference where someone predicted we would be living in an era of computer-driven cars by the end of 2016.
Writing in the Washington Post, he notes, “Wonderful as this future may be, the road to it will likely be rocky.”
He continues, “Imagine this terrible scene: The car ahead of you, its back seat packed with children, screeches to a halt, and your car’s software directs your car to take a sharp right to avoid it, hitting and killing a pedestrian.
“Who is morally responsible?”
This situation is similar to one I commented on in an earlier article, in which an autonomous vehicle must decide whether to collide with a motorcyclist wearing a helmet (and therefore more likely to survive the collision) or one not wearing a helmet. An algorithm that would decide to hit the helmeted rider creates perverse incentives to avoid wearing helmets—at least if word of the algorithm’s workings gets out.
Of course, autonomous vehicles will never be 100% safe—as long as they are safer than human-driven cars (a pretty low bar) we are ahead of the game.
Strain acknowledges that the number of traffic fatalities relative to today could plummet with the arrival of self-driving cars. However, he writes, because of the new technology, click-friendly headlines such as “Driverless cars kill again” will proliferate. He imagines politicians running for office on the platform of outlawing driverless cars.
Strain doesn’t offer a lot of answers on how to proceed, but he does propose one rule: “The rule likely should be simple: Machines should always be a tool for humans. Society should keep them in their proper station. But interpreting that rule and executing it properly is—please pardon the phrase—where the rubber hits the road.”
