Life matters: Autonomous tech: Self-driving cars and AI ethics

SAN FRANCISCO: Last month, California regulators allowed two companies that operate self-driving cars to accept paying customers in San Francisco. The first week did not go well.

One car drove itself onto freshly poured concrete in a road construction zone with traffic cones and workers with flags. The car got stuck in the wet concrete, and the company will be paying to repave the road.

In a more serious incident, a passenger in a driverless car was injured in a collision with a fire truck. As a result, the operator agreed to halve the number of driverless vehicles it operated in San Francisco.

The decision to permit self-driving cars may usher in a new era of transportation, or it may prove to be a false dawn.

Either way, the issues surrounding self-driving cars illustrate many of the ethical questions raised by the impact of artificial intelligence on everyday life.

A world in which most vehicles were fully autonomous would have many advantages. Most private cars spend a great deal of time idle. If everyone could call up an autonomous vehicle whenever required, there would be no need to own one’s own car, thus saving resources.

Moreover, by keeping traffic flowing more smoothly, the widespread use of driverless cars may also save fuel and time.

But the most important reason for eliminating human drivers is that it could also eliminate the human errors that cause so many traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths. (The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration puts the death toll on US roads last year at 42,795.)

Elon Musk has said that developing fully autonomous vehicles is a moral obligation because it can bring about a “virtually accident-free future.”

But that future is still some distance away: to date, the Teslas that Musk’s company makes have been involved in more than 700 crashes, with 17 fatalities, when operating on Autopilot, their driver assistance mode.

Both companies operating driverless cars in San Francisco claim that their cars are involved in fewer collisions, and especially fewer collisions involving injuries, than human drivers in a comparable driving environment.

But the validity of such claims is contested, owing to doubts about the driving environments being compared.

Looking further into the future, what if AI becomes so successful that few humans have jobs at all? Will we be able to develop new purposes that will replace the role of work in giving our lives meaning and fulfilment?

AI programming is likely to be another area for regulation. To return to the example of driverless vehicles, consumers in an unregulated market will seek cars that minimize the risk to themselves or their passengers, even if that significantly increases the risk to pedestrians.

One important but often overlooked ethical issue raised by autonomous vehicles is whether they should be programmed to avoid hitting animals, and if so, which ones.

All vertebrates, and some invertebrates, are sentient beings, liable to suffer if hit but not killed instantly. Moreover, in many species, the loss of a mate will cause distress, or may lead to dependent offspring starving to death.

How we should value the lives and interests of all sentient beings is a question that AI ethics needs to address.

Peter Singer is a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Tse Yip Fai is an AI researcher, contracted by the Princeton University Center for Human Values