In recent years the driverless car, as it can be seen in some science-fiction movies, is already a reality.
This technology is not yet allowed on the majority of roads and needs to be further developed because it causes some ethics problems.
“Driverless cars need a crash course in ethics” is an article published in The Time, the August 13th 2016.
This article talks about the evaluation of the driverless cars moral choices during an accident.
It explains that the choices algorithm of a driverless car must not only have a technical dimension but also a moral dimension.
In fact, during an accident, the moral dimension is very important because, referring to the first sentence of this article “Impending road accidents require drivers to make split-second decisions, calculating which action will cause the least damage”.
The question that we can asked us with driverless cars is: what do we tell the car to do in the event of complex life-and-death decision?
This article explains that the French and American researchers conducted a study to know what the public decide to save between pedestrians and passengers of car in event of a self-driving car being involved in an accident in order to provoke a public discussion around the questions of regulating artificial intelligence.
Scenarios of accident are ethically complex and involve difficult driverless cars decisions because the program doesn’t have a real social dimension.
This articles also explains that Scientifics have created a simulator named “The Moral Machine” in order to collect the decisions of people during an accident.
About 150,000 respondents answered 13 randomly generated questions and, each questions was an evil situation.
The results are collected for improve the moral choices of the driverless car.
However there appear to be cultural differences in the moral choices.
For example, some people even choose to spare animals over humans because they own pets and are adamant on protecting pets at all cost.
That is why the society will have to deal with strike an acceptable balance