The ethics in The Bicentennial Man and the ethics regarding self driving cars, although different in nature are inherently similar in their conflictions. In both conundrums the ethical dilemma revolves around the different valuations of life and which should be given a greater value in the event of an imminent death.
One of the big debates with the advent of self driving cars is the situational intricacies and how the car will respond. In the event of imminent death what will the artificial intelligence of the car decide and how does that value the life of one person over the life of another. For example, if the car has the decision to charge into a group of people, saving the lives of the people inside, or charging into a wall saving the group of people, but killing the passengers in the car which is the better option. Both are relatively terrible options, but the rational conscious of a person is able to decide the best relative decision while a computer must decide based on a strict set of predetermined rules. The computational capabilities of even computers with forms of artificial intelligence it is a nearly impossible and trivial matter to decide on because a group of people will always be disadvantaged by its decision.
Similarly, in The Bicentennial Man the consciousness of a “robot” is compared and contrasted to that of a human. In class the theoretical ethical dilemma that my group wrote about was if a robot is about to kill a human, should the bystander kill the robot to save the life of a human or should it not do anything because the robot has consciousness as well. Here is the consciousness of the robot worth more than a human, or vice-versa, or is that even a decision we can make?
In the dilemma present, it is not the humans decision to determine whether the consciousness of a robot is worth more than that of a human. As in the issues surrounding self driving cars, it is an inherent issue to determine who is valued more in any given moment or society. This is definitely an issue that we will embark on more and more as artificial intelligence gets more advanced.