Self-Driving Cars: Safer, but What of Their Morals

By Justin Pritchard
Associated Press
Originally posted November 19, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

"This is one of the most profoundly serious decisions we can make. Program a machine that can foreseeably lead to someone's death," said Lin. "When we make programming decisions, we expect those to be as right as we can be."

What right looks like may differ from company to company, but according to Lin automakers have a duty to show that they have wrestled with these complex questions and publicly reveal the answers they reach.

The entire article is here.

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.