Tesla and other leading car companies have made strides in self-driving car technology that will greatly improve our quality of life, but will also lead to ethical dilemmas. Men and women will be able to get ready for work on their commute, and high school kids will be able to do homework on the way to school. However, new technology has always created new problems. In this case, it brings up problems with human life. In a split second, how will a computer choose between the life of the driver, and a passenger on the street? Their needs to be a certain universal code set into law by the government, states, or the UN. This also leads to problems about jurisdiction on the restraints on self-driving cars that will need to be addressed.
There are many situations that will be seen as grey areas. One example is that the car will probably be programmed in the self-interest of the driver, meaning that if there is one person in the car, and one person in the street, it will crash itself in the interest of the driver. But, it will need a optional self-harm program if there are two people in the street, and only one driver in the car, because this would make the most sense. However, I would think that this would make the driver uncomfortable, since they are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for this new technology. If they are paying a high premium for this luxury, they are not going to want the car to choose to kill the driver (or get in a very expensive accident) instead of killing two people that they do not know. It will decrease sales if the consumers know that it could be potentially very dangerous, which will influence the car makers to program the cars with minimal self harm tendencies. Many people will think of this as a moral dilemma, and will not trust the technology, which is why government needs to take a role in regulating this new technology.
The amount of people harmed also needs to be taken into account, and the “quality” of each individual, before this technology is released. By quality I mean whether the woman is pregnant, or if the individual is a thief. Once computers are advanced enough to be able to detect the quality of each individual, and somehow quantity the opportunity cost of each situation, I would feel much more comfortable with having them on the streets. Maybe there is a point system, and if the individual is pregnant they would have more points because they are carrying another life in them, while humans with felonies on their record have a lower amount of points. Quantifying human life itself feels unethical, which is why there might not be a good answer to this dilemma. There are many questions to think about with rapid growth in technology.