Associated Incidents
It’s the year 2025. Your driverless car has just crashed into a tree at 55mph because its built-in computer valued a pedestrian’s life above your own. Your injuries are the result of a few lines of code that were hacked out by a 26-year-old software programmer in the San Francisco Bay Area back in the heady days of 2018. As you wait for a paramedic drone, bleeding out by the roadside, you ask yourself – where did it all go wrong?
The above scenario might sound fanciful, but death by driverless car isn’t just inevitable – it’s already happening. Most recently, an Uber self-driving car hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, while in May 2017, semi-autonomous software failed in a similarly tragic way when Joshua Brown’s Tesla Model S drove under the trailer of an 18-wheel truck on a highway while in Autopilot mode.
Tesla admits that its system sensors failed to distinguish the white trailer against a bright sky, resulting in the untimely death of the 40-year-old Floridian. But Tesla also says that drivers need to keep their hands on the wheel to stop accidents like this from happening, even when Autopilot is activated. Despite the name, it’s a semi-autonomous system.
Uber, on the other hand, may not be at fault, according to a preliminary police report, which lays the blame on the victim.
It’s a sad fact that these tragedies are just a taste what’s to come. In writing this article, I’ve realised how woefully unprepared we are for the driverless future – expected as soon as 2020. What’s more worrying is that this future is already spilling out into our present, thanks to semi-autonomous systems like Tesla’s Autopilot and Uber’s (now halted) self-driving car tests.
Tomorrow’s technology is here today, and with issues like ethics and liability now impossible to avoid, car makers can’t afford not to be ready.
What happens when a driverless car causes an accident and, worse still, kills someone?
Understanding death by computer
To tackle liability, we need to ask how and why a driverless car could kill someone. Unlike humans, cars don’t suffer fatigue, they don’t experience road rage, and they can’t knock back six pints of beer before hitting the highway – but they can still make mistakes.
Tesla’s Model S features semi-autonomous Autopilot technology
Arguably, the most likely cause of “death-by-driverless-car” would be if a car’s sensors were to incorrectly interpret data, causing the computer to make a bad driving decision. While every incident, fatal or otherwise, will result in fixes and improvements, tracing the responsibility would be a long and arduous legal journey. I’ll get to that later.
The second possible cause of death-by-driverless-car is much more difficult to resolve, because it’s all about ethics.
Picture this scenario: You’re riding in a driverless car with your spouse, travelling along a single-lane, tree-lined B-road. There are dozens upon dozens of B-roads like this in the UK. The car is travelling at 55mph, which is below the 60mph national speed limit on this road.
A blind bend is coming up, so your car slows down to a more sensible 40mph. As you travel around the bend, you see that a child has run out onto the road from a public footpath hidden in the trees. His mother panicked and followed him, and now they’re both in the middle of the road. It’s a windy day and your car is electric, so they didn’t hear you coming. The sensors on your car didn’t see either of them until they were just metres away.
There’s no chance of braking in time, so the mother and child are going to die if your car doesn’t swerve immediately. If the car swerves to the left, you go off-road and hit a tree; if the car swerves right, you hit an autonomous truck coming in the opposite direction. It’s empty, so you and your spouse would be the only casualties.
In this situation, the car is forced to make a decision – does it hit the pedestrians, almost certainly killing them, or does it risk the passengers in the probability that they may survive the accident. The answers will have been decided months (or even years) before, when the algorithms were originally programmed into your car’s computer system – and they could very well end your life. While the car won’t know it, this is in effect an ethical decision.
To demonstrate the overwhelming difficulty of coding ethics, have a go at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Moral Machine. It’s a quiz that aims to track how humans react to moral decisions made by self-driving cars. You’re presented with a series of scenarios where a driverless car has to choose between two evils (i.e. killing two passengers or five pedestrians) and you have to choose which one you think is most acceptable. As you’ll quickly realise, it’s really hard.
Which scenario would you choose? MIT’s Moral Machine is a self-driving nightmare
If all of this scares you, you’re not alone. In March, a survey by US motoring organisation AAA revealed that three out of four US drivers are “afraid” of riding i