Autonomous Vehicle Ethics: The Trolley Problem and Beyond

"A runaway trolley is speeding down a track" So begins what is perhaps the most fecund thought experiment of the past several decades since its invention by Philippa Foot. Since then, moral philosophers have applied the "trolley problem" as a thought experiment to study many different ethical conflicts - and chief among them is the programming of autonomous vehicles. Nowadays, however, very few philosophers accept that the trolley problem is a perfect analogy for driverless cars or that the situations autonomous vehicles face will resemble the forced choice of the unlucky bystander in the original thought experiment.

This book represents a substantial and purposeful effort to move the academic discussion beyond the trolley problem to the broader ethical, legal, and social implications that autonomous vehicles present. There are still urgent questions waiting to be addressed, for example: how AVs might interact with human drivers in mixed or "hybrid" traffic environments; how AVs might reshape our urban landscapes; what unique security or privacy concerns are raised by AVs as connected devices in the "Internet of Things"; how the benefits and burdens of this new technology, including mobility, traffic congestion, and pollution, will be distributed throughout society; and more.

An attempt to map the landscape of these next-generation questions and to suggest preliminary answers, this volume draws on the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, economics, urban planning and transportation engineering, business ethics and more, and represents a global range of perspectives.

Dr. Ryan Jenkins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and a former Co-Chair of the Robot Ethics Technical Committee of the IEEE. He studies the ethics of emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, and driverless cars. He has served on two NSF grants to study the ethical, legal, and social implications of autonomous vehicles. He has published extensively in academic journals and his work has appeared in public fora including the Washington Post, Slate, and Forbes.

Dr. David Cerný is a research fellow at the Institute of State and Law of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is a founding member of the Karel Capek Center for Values in Science and Technology. His research interests range from normative to applied ethics, primarily focusing on artificial intelligence, robotics, and medical ethics. He has served on two Technology Agency of the Czech Republic grants to investigate the ethical implications of autonomous vehicles and end-of-life decisions. He also served as an expert at the European Commission. Czech media often interview him on issues related to applied ethics, and his work has appeared in public fora.

Dr. Tomás Hríbek is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Together with David Cerný, he is the founder of the Karel Capek Center for Values in Science and Technology. He has published on topics ranging from philosophy of mind and science, to ethics (particularly bioethics, and more recently the ethics of emerging technologies) and aesthetics. He also teaches at several colleges, including Charles University and Anglo-American University, in his hometown of Prague.