Trolleys and Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

AbstractRecent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the scrutiny of artificial intelligence applications. While we applaud this deserved attention, we are concerned that a substantial portion of the ethical theorizing in this domain has proceeded with insufficient attention to the details of the technology involved. This paper argues for a new approach to reasoning about the ethics of machine learning. We make our case by way of an extended evaluation of the literature on autonomous vehicles and trolley cases. We show that theorizing on this topic has relied on a mistaken assumption about how the engineering of autonomous vehicles is likely to proceed. We argue that identifying this mistake allows us to see why trolley cases are not immediately useful in answering moral questions about autonomous vehicles, and it reveals how to proceed when crafting moral arguments about any technology that makes use of machine learning.