Page - (000108) - in Autonomes Fahren - Technische, rechtliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte

Implementable Ethics for Autonomous Vehicles96 has a concept of harm and a sense of what actions result in harm. This raises a number of challenges with regards to the information available, similar to those discussed above for a consequentialist cost function approach. The movie “I, Robot” dramatizes this law with a robot calculating the survival probabilities of two people to several significant figures to decide which one to save. Developing such a capability seems unlikely in the near future or, at least, much more challenging then the development of the automated vehicle itself. Instead of trying to deduce harm or injury to humans, might it be sufficient for the vehicle to simply attempt to avoid collisions? After all, the most likely way that an auto- mated vehicle could injure a human is through the physical contact of a collision. Avoiding minor injuries such as closing a hand in a car door could be considered the responsibility of the human and not the car, as it is today. Restricting the responsibility to collision avoid- ance would mean that the car would not have to be programmed to sacrifice itself to protect human life in an accident in which it would otherwise not have been involved. The ethical responsibility would simply be to not initiate a collision rather than to prevent harm2. Col- lisions with more vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists could be prioritized above collisions with other cars or those producing only property damage. Such an approach would not necessarily produce the best outcome in a pure consequen- tialist calculation: it could be that a minor injury to a pedestrian could be less costly to society as a whole than significant property damage. Collisions should, in any event, be very rare events. Through careful control system design, automated cars could conceivably avoid any collisions that are avoidable within the constraints placed by the laws of physics [17, 18]. In those rare cases where collisions are truly unavoidable, society might accept suboptimal outcomes in return for the clarity and comfort associated with automated vehi- cles that possess a clear respect for human life above other priorities. Replacing the idea of harm and injury with the less abstract notion of a collision, how- ever, produces some rules that are more actionable for the vehicle. Taking the idea of pri- oritizing human life and the most vulnerable road users and phrasing the resulting hierarchy in the spirit of Asimov’s laws gives: 1. An automated vehicle should not collide with a pedestrian or cyclist. 2. An automated vehicle should not collide with another vehicle, except where avoiding such a collision would conflict with the First Law. 3. An automated vehicle should not collide with any other object in the environment, except where avoiding such a collision would conflict with the First or Second Law. These are straightforward rules that can be implemented in an automated vehicle and prioritized according to this hierarchy by the proper choice of slack variables on constraint violation. Such ethical rules would only require categorization of objects and not attempt 2 It is possible that an automated vehicle could, while avoiding an accident, take an action that results in a collision for other vehicles being unavoidable. Such possibilities could be eliminated by communication among the vehicles and appropriate choice of constraints.