For this issue, I will focus on the ethics of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of a design team working on designing a driverless car. I will be considering the consultation on the regulation of autonomous vehicles according to the Law Society. Our team’s reaction is that the proper safety precautions and standards should be set in place to ensure that any autonomous vehicle properly abides by safety standards to prevent accidents and negligence.
A design team would need to decide on what is sufficiently safe for the autonomous vehicle. One metric that can be used to gauge safety is that autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human drivers. This could be measured by autonomous vehicles having a much lower number of injuries and deaths in comparison to a human driver. Additionally a design team would need to ensure that the systems in place that do not prioritise a certain group over others or discriminate. This could cause problems where the autonomous vehicle might prevent an accident from occurring for only a certain group of race, sex or disability, which is not the ideal outcome as the systems should treat everyone equally to ensure safety of pedestrians.
Additionally, proper authorisation of autonomous features should be in place to ensure that all companies producing autonomous vehicles meet a certain legal threshold for their features to ensure predictability between different autonomous vehicles and ensuring that autonomous vehicles would respond appropriately to different hazards.
Another factor is misleading marketing in which consumers might not understand the extent at which they should pay attention to the road as the vehicle drives autonomously. Self-driving should be distinguished from assisted driving technologies so that the driver is aware of what classifies as autonomous and when they should be in control of the vehicle. There should be certain events in which the vehicles is able to respond to a hazard or fault and drive accordingly, without the input of the driver. Whereas the vehicle should also be able to effectively communicate to the driver that they are needed to take control of the vehicle if a hazard or fault is at a level where the vehicle cannot mitigate the issue by itself.
The design team would need to make sure that management understands these aspects for the autonomous vehicles to ensure that the vehicle does not cause more harm than traditionally driven vehicles.
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