Business Ethical issues relating to autonomous vehicles PDF

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ACCG8022 Business Report

Business Ethical issues relating to autonomous vehicles Word count: 2200

Student number：45857040 Student Name:

Zhe ZHAO

Table of Content: Executive Summary

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1 Introduction 2 2 Findings and Discussion

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2.1 The trolley problem of designing software for autonomous vehicles 2.2 Benefits and risks of trolley problem

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2.3 Alternative ways 3 2.3.1 Risk Management

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2.3.2 Update Safety/Interoperability Standards

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2.4 Why ethical issues are important for businesses to understand 3 Reflection

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Self-Driving Vehicles’ Benefits Self-Driving Vehicles’ risks 4 Conclusion

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Reference

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Executive Summary This report focuses on analysing the ethical issue autonomous vehicles driverless systems face in trolley problem. To start with, this report introduces trolley problem in the context of autonomous vehicle industry and lists the benefits and risks of trolley problem in self-driving cars. Risk management and standardizing regulations are given in the report as alternative ways to mitigate the trolley problem ethical issue for the automated vehicles. The report then explains the reason why it is important for business to consider moral issues in the AV procedure designing. Next, give reflection on the self-driving vehicles’ future trend by listing its advantages and disadvantages. This report believes that autonomous vehicles will be ubiquitous someday due to planty benefits, such as emission reduction, lower the accidents rate and improving people’s wellbeing. However, it still needs technology improving and humanity rules completing before autonomous vehicles finally could be accepted by the crowds.

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1. Introduction With the development of science in the modern society, autonomous vehicles were invented for a long time and it is regarded to have great potential in the future. However, as the selfdriving tech being participating in the public traffic increasingly, it also aroused social concerns. As software is the essential controlling centre for the self-driving cars, the key reason the autonomous driving getting people’s concern is it involves ethical issues in what choice the programs would make for cars in trolley problems.(Holstein & Dodig-Crnkovic, 2018) Trolley problem is a famous ethics dilemma about choosing to kill one or more person to save other lives involved in the actual accident scenarios. It happens when the autonomous car finds there is not a way to prevent a collision, the program will then analyse which outcome do the least harmful collision. (Wiseman, Y. and Grinberg, I., 2018) This report will focus on introducing the ethics issues of trolley problems caused by selfdriving vehicle software. Analyse the potential benefits and risks of using trolley problem in program designing. Although the software has risks and involve ethical issue, the challenges might be solved by the alternative ways, risk management and ethical deliberation system that relating ethical theory. Meanwhile, the report will also discuss whether the autonomous vehicles will be ubiquitous by giving a reflection on the benefits and risks of the Self-Driving cars. Based on the report analyse, I will talk about my own opinion on the autonomous vehicles’ future trend in the end.

2. Findings and Discussion 2.1 The trolley problem of designing software for autonomous vehicles Trolley problem has been considered as a thought experiment to address the ethical aspect of autonomous driving cars so far (Holstein & Dodig-Crnkovic, 2018). The general scenario of trolley problem is discussed as a high speed travelling self-driving car only have two choices during an accident: Choose to kill a group of people happen to appear on the middle of street or to turn the car into predestine to hit an innocent cyclist. Both choices will cause death tragedy and there is not a best solution to avoid harmless (Holstein & Dodig-Crnkovic, 2018). As trolley problem considered an ethical issue in the context of autonomous vehicles, it is different from the real engineering problems that happen in the real situation. This means self-driving car cannot make a choice like people during the accident, because it is regulated by the pre-set software put inside it by the vehicle company (Wendel, 2018). Meanwhile, it could face the choice to find out which people it should rescue by evaluating which life is more valuable. However, it arouses lots of discussion on which kind of people the car should rescue when the companies design the real program, because it is an ethical issue. Human will combine their emotion when making decision, while the autonomous vehicles are controlled only by the procedure. It is considered unethical for some people (Lenben, 2017)

2.2 Benefits and risks of trolley problem Despite considered as an ethical issue, trolley problem is at least useful in two aspects. The first is that it helps identify the common responses of the correct reaction. By altering the 2

trolley problem procedure and outcome keeps the same, researchers begin to find out the reason behind human’s reaction and intuition (Noah J. Goodall 2016). The second useful aspect is that it helps to make a proper choice in the extreme situation without putting ethic in the first place. A procedure self-driving car would always choose to hit a man wearing helmet rather than the people with no protect measures (Noah J. Goodall 2016). Following by the two useful points, trolley problem also shows its benefits in another way. The autonomous vehicles can reduce the risk of traffic accident. According to coinciding estimates, about 90% of the traffic accident in Germany were caused by human error. Automatic vehicles work without error if they are programmed correctly. Moreover, the higher level of the development of the robot, the more complex traffic situation they can deal with (Brenner, W. and Herrmann, A., 2018). As for the risk of trolley problem, the first is that it represents a false dilemma. It usually has predetermined outcomes and perfect assumption of the environment, while sometimes it is an unrealistic promise (Noah J. Goodall 2016). The second risk of trolley problem is that is always involves two choice, for it uses programming language, yes or no. However, it is more complex in the real-world situation. There could be multi-choices for a driver to balance the danger rather than limited to two choices in the system (Noah J. Goodall 2016). Trolley problem makes risk balancing impossible, because the system must choose one between two death involved actions. The outcomes are always limited, predetermined and disastrous (Keeling 2019).

2.3 Alternative ways of trolley problem 2.3.1 Risk management To find the alternative measure to minimise that trolley problem risks, risk management is considered as an effective way (Noah J. Goodall 2016). Risk management is the process of identifying, evaluating, and taking actions to control threats to an objective (Hubbard 2009). It particularly refers to the decisions of how to allocate and balance the risks and can be applied to automated vehicle decision making (Noah J. Goodall 2016). There are two basic form of risk management: which are considering each potential outcome’s magnitude and considering outcome’s probability. Magnitude is the measurement of the number of injured people and the value lost in the accident. While the probability is often derived from historical experiments, data, model, and some evidenced guesses. Risk management using in trolley problem software designing is transparent and easy to adjust. The system could automatically adjust the risk management for vehicles behaving unsafely to avoid risks (Rios-Torres,2016). Another benefit of risk management is that it always recommends an action in case of the deontological-ethics-based car stops on a highway that could cause accident (Noah J. Goodall 2016).

2.3.2 Update safety/interoperability standards Another alternative way to minimise trolley problem risks is to update safety and interoperability standards. The US government has already started in regulating self-driving carsn(Rogers 2017). Standardizing AV regulation is a necessary step to promote the safe 3

operation of the self-driving vehicles. Thus, it is necessary to get some level of uniformity in AV design, performance, safety, and interoperability standards. However, this have not gotten enough notice among the autonomous vehicles industry yet (Borenstein, J, 2019).

2.4 Why ethical issues are important for business to understand It is believed that self-driving vehicle is the future of transportation system and will be popular in the global transport system someday (Holstein & Dodig-Crnkovic, 2018). As trolley problem is the key controversy in the autonomous vehicles industry, it is obvious that solving the ethical issues could gain the AV companies better reputations than other competitors, and also could promote the popularity of autonomous vehicles’ to new customers. Next, as the technology nowadays still is not advanced enough to overcome ethical issues in trolley problem, being aware of its importance can motivate the vehicle companies update the software system preventing self-driving cars from trolley problem situations ( Lenden, 2017). In the industry development perspective, it is a virtuous cycle that could promote the progressing in the autonomous cars field when companies understand the importance of ethical issues in trolley problem. It starts from business getting to notice ethical issues’ importance, as a result, they update the system to get more customers and profit, and then reinvest the profit in R&D to produce more advanced self-driving cars for more customers.

3. Reflection As autonomous vehicles being participating in the public traffic increasingly, but the technology obviously has limitations for now, it is still under discussion whether the selfdriving cars will be ubiquitous someday. As the fast-pace in technology progressing in the modern society and system-controlled vehicles also have a bunch of considerable benefits, I think it has great possibility to be ubiquitous one day. Now let us see the details of AV’s benefits and risks

Self-driving vehicles’ benefits There are few benefits of autonomous vehicles. The first one is that self -driving cars can reduce the car accident rate. According to USDOT website, up to 90% of the car accidents cause by human error. For autonomous cars, it could avoid “human error” if it is correctly programmed. It has been estimated that over 1,000 lives, 30,000 hospitalisations $16 billion in crash-related would be saved every year if automated transport is fully achieving in Australia (Pettigrew, 2018). The second benefit is that autonomous vehicles application could smooth the traffic waves and reduce the vehicle emission. It is proved that even with 5% of the autonomous cars on the street, vehicle emissions of the entire fleet may be reduced by between 15% (for carbon dioxide) and 73% (for nitrogen oxides) when stop-and-go waves are reduced or eliminated by the dampening action of the autonomous vehicle in the flow of human drivers (Stern, R.E, 2019). The third advantage of self-driving vehicles is that it can reduce fuel consumption. AV technology could improve the fuel economy by 4-10% by accelerating and decelerating more smoothly than a human driver (Anderson, J.M, 2014). It is discovered by researchers in 4

Illinois University that even a small group of self-driving cars on the road could reduce the fuel consumption by up to 40%. Last but not the least is that autonomous cars could increase people’s wellbeing. On one hand, it provides convenience and safety for disabled people when they travel by cars. On the other hand, AV could reduce travel time and transport cost. According to a report from KPMG, autonomous vehicles may save up to US$1.3 trillion worth of cost and time per year by cut travel time and reduce fuel consumption.

Self-driving vehicles’ risks The risks of automated vehicles are mainly in the technology and humanity field. The basic challenge is trolley problem in software designing. As all the software, AV program is a computer language and is programmed by developers, so the safety of the procedure is important. If the hacker can easily attack an AV system and lead it to a car crash, it will cause considerable damage. It needs the system to recognize the malicious modifying and reprogram the procedure automatically to avoid any tragedies (Adriano, et al, 2015). The second risk of the automated vehicles also relates to the technology field. AV’s sensor could have difficulty operating during a bad situation, such as an extreme weather or a poor traffic light signal (Holstein & Dodig-Crnkovic, 2018). As for humanity aspect, the popularity of automated vehicles will make drivers lose jobs, which means taxi drivers and transport drivers are no longer necessary in the society (Godoll & Muller, 2017). Furthermore, driverless systems will trigger many discussions on legal, ethical and financial responsibility in the accident. It is unrealistic to make the system take the responsibility when the accidents come to injuries and deaths.

4. Conclusion According to the report, trolley problem is the basic ethic issue for autonomous vehicles industry. Although it helps identify the common responses of the correct reaction and could reduce crash rate to some extent, the predetermined scenarios and choices sometimes could be limited and unrealistic. To deal with the conflicts, risk management is recommended to help the driverless system make a choice in ethical perspective. Standardizing automated vehicles regulation in producing and road rules can be another way to minimise AV risks in trolley problem. In addition, understanding the importance of ethical issues matters for business because the companies will gain better reputation and more customer. It will also from a virtuous cycle between users and industry. For the AV industry reflection, I got my opinion through all the related articles I have read that I agree autonomous vehicles can be ubiquitous someday, because of plenty benefits, such as reducing car accident, improve fuel economy and reduce pollution emission. However, before the popularity come true, technology and humanity regulations both need to be update. The industry still needs to improve AV technology in many aspects. For example: Protect the driverless system from hackers. Improve sensor’s working ability in extreme situations. While the government needs to complete the law provisions in case of the debates on legal, ethical, and financial responsibility in the accident once self-driving vehicles become popular on day. 5

Reference Anderson, J.M., Nidhi, K., Stanley, K.D., Sorensen, P., Samaras, C. and Oluwatola, O.A., 2014. Autonomous vehicle technology: A guide for policymakers. Rand Corporation. Borenstein, J., Herkert, J.R. and Miller, K.W., 2019. Self-driving cars and engineering ethics: The need for a system level analysis. Science and engineering ethics, 25(2), pp.383398. Davis, J.L., 2015. Autonomous and connected vehicles: a law enforcement primer. NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA. Goodall, N.J., 2017. From trolleys to risk: Models for ethical autonomous driving. Holstein, T. and Dodig-Crnkovic, G., 2018, May. Avoiding the intrinsic unfairness of the trolley problem. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Fairness (pp. 32-37). Hubbard, Douglas (2009). The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It. John Wiley & Sons. p. 46. Lin, P., 2016. Why ethics matters for autonomous cars. In Autonomous driving (pp. 69-85). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Leben, D., 2017. A Rawlsian algorithm for autonomous vehicles. Ethics and Information Technology, 19(2), pp.107-115. Pettigrew, S., Talati, Z. and Norman, R., 2018. The health benefits of autonomous vehicles: Public awareness and receptivity in Australia. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 42(5), pp.480-483. Stern, R.E., Chen, Y., Churchill, M., Wu, F., Delle Monache, M.L., Piccoli, B., Seibold, B., Sprinkle, J. and Work, D.B., 2019. Quantifying air quality benefits resulting from few autonomous vehicles stabilizing traffic. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 67, pp.351-365. Rogers, G. (2017). House E&C considering 16 automated vehicle bills—Here’s what’s in them. Eno Transportation Weekly, June 5. https://www.enotrans.org/article/house-ecconsidering-16-automated-vehicle-bills-heres-whats/. Accessed July 22, 2017. Wiseman, Y. and Grinberg, I., 2018. The Trolley Problem Version of Autonomous Vehicles. The Open Transportation Journal, 12(1).

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