Ethical Issues in Driverless Cars
The use of technology is one of the most significant discussions in research that has brought many questions which cannot be answered; it has the capability of many innocent people suffer. Ethical dilemma requires ethical thinking when it comes to analysis and application of ethical principles. Consideration of both people and the environment should be paramount in any ethical advancement. This concerns about science governance and the science-society relationship results to consequences like who will be affected and to what extent and degree.
A challenge at pedestrian crossings is one of the examples that is experienced mostly in our roads when it comes to driverless cars, machines and human should not be evaluated using the same criteria. The car is programmed to detect the face of human being and some of the features, unlike technology, human are good at perception and mechanical tasks and can perform a simple task in a perfect way that is often hard for machines to perform the same task in perfection and this gives a clear indicator that what is easy for a human is often hard for machines ( https://doi.org/10.1002/cssc.201900298). Human mind perceives and evaluates things, these evaluations builds the skills for human to be far much better than machines and this makes these skills difficult to program on a machine.
Here comes my big question, if given that self-driving cars are better off than human drivers, why should the car be subjected to the roles that were designed for human liability and errors? Given that the skill of a human mind is hard to be engineered to a machine, how should a car decide on whether to save the lives of its passengers and the lives of the pedestrians as compared to humans that the role of reason in ethical judgment will evaluate the right of self-rule and the right of life. My opinion regarding the whole thing is that cars are meant to be under the control of human beings since human life cannot be placed under the care of a machine.