Do you think about self-driving, fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) often? I'm in the car business so of course, I talk about them way more than the average American does, but who really thinks about that stuff outside of the movie theatre other than people like Professor Iyad Rahwan? After listening to his TedTalks speech on YouTube I can see that the future of Autonomous Vehicles is dependent on figuring out some ethical issues more than anything else.

It's a very interesting dilemma. 

Did you know that 40,200 people died in 2016 (first time more than 40k people have died in a single year in 10 years) due to traffic accidents, and 1.2 million people died worldwide? Neither did I until I listened to Professor Rahwan's speech. The majority of these accidents were due to human error, so let me ask you this, what if there were a way to eliminate the majority of the accidents by removing the human error with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and self-driving fully autonomous vehicles?

This is the question Professor Rahwan asks, but it's not a simple solution even though eliminating accidents caused by human error would be for the "greater good" in reality. When people were surveyed in his research he found that the people who thought a self-driving car should make choices to protect the greater good also said they would never buy a car like that. What they really wanted, he found, was a car that always kept them the passenger safe but everyone else's car should make choices for the greater good. Yeah, OK.

So what is this greater good I keep mentioning anyway?

Well think of it this way, your self-driving car malfunctions, and it happens in a populated area. Remember that you're just a passenger and the car is in control. The car's artificial intelligence (AI) is going make a decision due to the malfunction to either continue on its current path and run right into a group of people crossing the road and kill them all, or it can swerve to the left hitting one pedestrian killing him/her but coming to a stop and saving the group and you. Making a decision for the greater good would mean the one person dies in order for the car to stop and not kill many.

Make sense?

Well here's where the major dilemma is, you're in the car too and your life matters for something right? So when you're faced with your own life being in jeopardy what do you think the right choice is? Hit the group, the single pedestrian, or how about a third option. Let's say the car could swerve to the right and run smack into a building stopping the car from hitting anyone except in the crash you're guaranteed not to survive?

Different scenario now huh?

Some people as Professor Rahwan points out choose to take their own life and save all the others for the greater good. Others save themselves and take out the one pedestrian, and of course, some choose to allow the car to run its natural course and possibly kill many in the group crossing the road. Who is right and who is wrong? No one really, everyone is right in this case and there are points to be made for any of the points of view.

So what do we do? Regulators will figure out regulations and debates will take place by debaters, but ultimately I agree with those that believe the manufacturers of the vehicle technology, the artificial intelligence inside the vehicles will play a key role in all of this. Imagine an algorithm that decides how your car chooses to act in the scenarios we talked about based on how you program your vehicle's settings?

Crazy right?

Maybe someday I will be delivering a fully autonomous self-driving Nissan X038 and instead of showing my customer how to operate their navigation system or program their Homelink I will be walking them through what is mostly a personality/psychology test to help the car understand how the passenger/owner would want it to respond and react to different traffic scenarios.

My Mind is blown!

How far away are we from this being a reality? Would you want to drive a self-driving vehicle? More importantly, would you be comfortable programming a vehicle's computer to think for you in life and death scenarios inside that vehicle? I mean we have idiots all the time doing stupid things in vehicles that cost innocent lives. Think about the lunatic that "heard voices in his head" telling him to swerve his car onto the sidewalk in New York City and wipe out tens of pedestrians not long ago. 

There is definitely a lot to think about in the coming days for the future of self-driving autonomous vehicles, and that future may be closer than we think! 

If you want to have some fun with this, check out the Moral Machine and run through the scenarios and see what the data says about you, plus watch Professor Rahwan's TedTalk here!

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