Page - (000112) - in Autonomes Fahren - Technische, rechtliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte

Implementable Ethics for Autonomous Vehicles100 If the current road segment does not normally allow passing, a maneuver into the adja- cent lane may not be safe. A lack of visibility, for instance, could prevent the vehicle from detecting oncoming traffic with sufficient time to avoid a collision. In such cases, it may be inappropriate to reduce the cost or constraint weight on the lane boundary regardless of the desire for mobility in order to maintain the primacy of respect for human life. In such cases, an alternative could be to use the shoulder of the road for maneuvering as shown in Figure 5.8. This could be allowed at speed to maintain traffic flow or only after coming to a stop in a situation like Figure 5.6 where the vehicle determines motion is otherwise impossible. Obviously many different priorities and behaviors can be programmed into the vehicle simply by placing different costs on collision avoidance, hazardous situations, traffic laws and goals such as mobility or traffic flow. The examples described here are far from complete and developing a reasonable set of costs or constraints capable of ethical decision-making in a variety of settings requires further work. The hope is that these examples not only illus- trate the possibility of coding such decisions through the language of costs and constraints but also highlight the possibility of discussing priorities in programming openly. By map- ping ethical principles and mobility goals to costs and constraints, the relative priority given to these objectives can be clearly discussed among programmers, regulators, road users and other stakeholders. 5.7 Human Override and the “Big Red Button” Philosophers have noted the challenge of finding a single ethical framework that adequate- ly addresses the needs of robots or automated vehicles [2, 3, 4, 12]. Examining the problem from a mathematical perspective shows the advantage of combining deontological and consequentialist perspectives in programming ethical rules. In particular, the combination Fig. 5.7 In a passing zone that places a low weight on the lane divider, the car passes on the left Fig. 5.8 If the adjacent lane is too hazardous, the vehicle can use the road shoulder if that is safe