Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Thursday, September 25, 2014

You Should Have a Say in Your Robot Car’s Code of Ethics

By Jason Millar
Wired
Originally posted September 2, 2014

Here are some excerpts:

Informed consent wasn’t always the standard of practice in healthcare. It used to be common for physicians to make important treatment decisions on behalf of patients, often actively deceiving them as part of a treatment plan.

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For starters, we could choose to consider a manufacturer’s failure to obtain informed consent from a user, in situations involving deep moral commitments, a kind of product defect. Just as a doctor would be liable for failing to seek a patient’s informed consent before proceeding with a medical treatment, so too could we consider manufacturers liable for failing to reasonably respect user’s explicit moral preferences in the design of autonomous cars and other technologies. This approach would add considerably to the complexity of design. Then again, nobody said engineering robots was supposed to be simple.

The entire article is here.