DECIDING WHO TO KILL

It was one of those summer days, when nothing was to be done, that my brother suggested seeing the film “I robot”. Not that I expected much from it, but I just decided to give it a try. I remember seeing all those human robots, self-driving cars and high-tech instruments with that feeling of: “at least we are not like that”.

The thing is that lately I’ve been realizing how close we actually are to this kind of mechanized society. I’ll bet you’ve all heard about the self-driving cars that are already in the market. Those cars are not only there so that people don’t have to drive but indeed they are suppose to decide, better than humans, what to do in the road. These cars are making decisions for us.

As I looked more deeply into the topic, I came across what seems to be the biggest problem when talking about self-driving cars: the ethical issue. As I said before, these cars have to decide what’s better for us, and that’s not an easy task. Imagine your car is driving down a very narrow road by a cliff and suddenly a bunch of kinds appear in the middle of the road. With no time to stop, your options are basically two: kill the kids and safe yourself or, on the other hand, do a left turn and fall off the cliff. Kind of a hard decision there. If you were the one driving you would probably go for the second option, more of a reflex than for the moral issue. Anyway, if the car is driving itself, the decision made would be the one implemented by the programmer, so it has nothing to do with reflexes. Between the two options, killing the kids might seem to be the wrong choice. But if the car decided to do a left  turn, it would mean killing yourself. And who would buy a car that would rather safe others than you? These self-driving cars are supposed to be safer and avoid accidents but, at what cost?

Obviously this situation mentioned is not very likely to happen, but programmers have to prepare these cars for everything. I found this ethical problem quite interesting. When I first heard about it, it struck me how these cars are actually deciding who to kill. We, then, would be putting our lives in a robot’s hands.

Google's self-driving car