Autonomous vehicles are already making profound choices about whose lives matter, according to experts, so we might want to pay attention.
"Every time the car makes a complex maneuver, it is implicitly making trade-off in terms of risks to different parties," Iyad Rahwan, an MIT cognitive scientist, wrote in an email.
The most well-known issues in AV ethics are trolly problems—moral questions dating back to the era of trollies that ask whose lives should be sacrificed in an unavoidable crash. For instance, if a person falls onto the road in front of a fast-moving AV, and the car can either swerve into a traffic barrier, potentially killing the passenger, or go straight, potentially killing the pedestrian, what should it do?
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