"“This is one of the most profoundly serious decisions we can make. Program a machine that can foreseeably lead to someone’s death,” Lin said. “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.
Lin said he has discussed the ethics of driverless cars with Google, as well as automakers including Tesla, Nissan and BMW. As far as he knows, only BMW has formed an internal group to study the issue.
“No one has a good answer for how safe is safe enough,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor who has written extensively on self-driving cars. The cars “are going to crash, and that is something that the companies need to accept and the public needs to accept.”"
- Date Published:11/22/2014
- Original Publication:San Francisco Chronicle