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Why Ethics Matters for Autonomous Cars70 industry, which is to say that I will mainly raise the questions here and not presume to have any definitive answers at such an early stage of the technology. A brief note about terminology I will use “autonomous”, “self driving”, “driverless”, and “robot” interchangeably. These refer primarily to future vehicles that may have the ability to operate without human intervention for extended periods of time and to perform a broad range of actions. I will also use “cars” to refer loosely to all motor vehicles, from a motorcycle to a freight truck; those distinctions do not matter for the discussion here. 4.1 Why ethics matters To start, let me offer a simple scenario that illustrates the need for ethics in autonomous cars. Imagine in some distant future, your autonomous car encounters this terrible choice: it must either swerve left and strike an eight-year old girl, or swerve right and strike an 80-year old grandmother [33]. Given the car’s velocity, either victim would surely be killed on impact. If you do not swerve, both victims will be struck and killed; so there is good reason to think that you ought to swerve one way or another. But what would be the ethi- cally correct decision? If you were programming the self-driving car, how would you instruct it to behave if it ever encountered such a case, as rare as it may be? Striking the grandmother could be the lesser evil, at least to some eyes. The thinking is that the girl still has her entire life in front of her – a first love, a family of her own, a career, and other adventures and happiness – while the grandmother has already had a full life and her fair share of experiences. Further, the little girl is a moral innocent, more so than just about any adult. We might agree that the grandmother has a right to life and as valuable a life as the little girl’s; but nevertheless, there are reasons that seem to weigh in favor of saving the little girl over the grandmother, if an accident is unavoidable. Even the grand- mother may insist on her own sacrifice, if she were given the chance to choose. But either choice is ethically incorrect, at least according to the relevant professional codes of ethics. Among its many pledges, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), for instance, commits itself and its 430,000+ members “to treat fairly all persons and to not engage in acts of discrimination based on race, religion, gender, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” [23]. Therefore, to treat individuals differently on the basis of their age, when age is not a relevant factor, seems to be exactly the kind of discrimination the IEEE prohibits [18, 33]. Age does not appear to be a relevant factor in our scenario as it might be in, say, casting a young actor to play a child’s character in a movie. In that movie scenario, it would be appropriate to reject adult actors for the role. Anyway, a reason to discriminate does not necessarily justify that discrimination, since some reasons may be illegitimate. Even if we point to the disparity of life experiences between the old and the young, that difference isn’t automatically an appropriate basis for different treatment.