When assessing the design of our driverless car, we must prioritise the safety and well-being of users and other stakeholders including: pedestrians, factory workers and future vehicle mechanics. The key ethical and regulatory issues are outlined below:
1. Safety
The immediate ethical concern is the safety of passengers, pedestrians and others on the road. We must ensure that the design minimises the risk of accidents and prioritises human life above all else. Additionally, we must ensure that the manufacturing process does not include any needless risk to the safety of factory workers.
2. Privacy
A driverless vehicle has the potential to track a significant amount of location data, which could be considered very valuable by some companies. We must ensure that we cannot abuse our user’s trust by establishing robust and open data collection protocols, and take steps to ensure that collected data is secure and cannot be accessed by unauthorised or malicious third-parties.
3. Equity
We must ensure that all features of our product are accessible to all segments of society, and that our design does not exacerbate existing inequalities regarding access to transport. For example, a hands-free unlocking feature must be able to recognise faces of all ethnicities. Computer vision applications in particular have a history of discriminatory behaviour due to low subject diversity in training data.
4. Regulatory Compliance
On top of all other ethical guidelines, we must ensure that we adhere to all the relevant regulatory frameworks, including; safety standards, data protection laws, liability regulation, cybersecurity regulation, environmental protection laws and labour law. Compliance is not only ethically necessary, but is a requirement to be able to legally operate in the market.
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