Ethics in Autonomous Cars
In this century technology and automation is all that is required so as to compete effectively in the business world. The haste towards the development and manufacture of autonomous cars is the new talk in the automotive world of today. Big companies such as the Tesla, Volvo and the Mercedes Benz have already got into the game and modeled the various concepts (Gerla et al, 2014). The transition of evolving from driven cars to self-driven cars has been hit hard due to the fact that not only are they infringing but also lack mundane ethics. For instance, the brains behind the manufacture of autonomous cars should consider the safety of the people around them such as cyclists and pedestrians, however, conflicts have been witnessed when discussing mundane situations such as crosswalks, intersections, and turns on the roads.
Moreover, the sense that these cars should drive more safely than human drivers, there is a big question about the safety of society. Pursuing this further, philosophers have debated these mundane situations basing the fact on the trolley problem scenario which has been discussed for quite a long time (Lin, 70). Lin, (70) further adds that the environmentalists have also come to the heated discussion on their ethics urging that these cars don’t have ethics to the environment since any slight change in the computer-controlled braking, cornering, and acceleration can have huge negative impacts on environmental pollution and the energy use.
In conclusion, the autonomous cars have a very enormous challenge in the ethics sector since the barely have them (Gerla et al, 2014). This is because they operate like a computerized robot which understands less on the facts of the society making them difficult to abide by the laws and minimize the damages occurring from morally complex situations.
References
Gerla, Mario, et al. “Internet of vehicles: From intelligent grid to autonomous cars and vehicular clouds.” Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2014 IEEE World Forum on. IEEE, 2014.
Lin, Patrick. “Why ethics matters for autonomous cars.” Autonomes fahren. Springer Vieweg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015. 69-85.