学进去

Here’s one scene. Say you are in heavy traffic and your car’s brakes (刹车) start to fail. If you keep going, you will go into the back of a truck and probably die. But if you turn sharply to avoid the truck, you risk hitting an elderly woman or a group of children. What do you do?

This is an extreme choice. But every day, drivers around the world have to make quick decisions to avoid accidents. Often, they react without even having time to think. But what would a driverless car do?

Self-driving cars are designed to deal with all sorts of situations, from understanding traffic rules to planning the easiest route that avoids construction. These programming decisions are direct and clear. Ethics (道德), on the other hand, is not. How do you program a car to decide what to do in the case of an accident? How do you choose which life is more valuable? And who gets to choose? This is a problem that ethicists, lawyers, and car makers are all wondering about.

Patrick Lin teaches robotics and ethics at California Polytechnic State University. He says that it might seem easy to say that self-driving cars must follow certain rules to minimize or reduce harm, but he says, “even that leads to morally murky (模糊的) decisions.” He gives an example: on one side of you is a motorcyclist wearing a helmet; on the other is a motorcyclist not wearing a helmet. If the car’s computer tells it to minimize harm during a necessary turn, that might mean hitting the person with the helmet. After all, they are better protected and so less likely to be hurt. But, Lin asks, aren’t you being unfair to the responsible (负责的) motorist?

According to Lin, any type of decision-making based on age, gender, or any similar factor would be discrimination (歧视) and therefore against standards of ethics. He explained that even the safest car runs the risk of having accidents, and that the responsibility for programming will lie with the car makers.

But some experts say we don’t need to worry about this problem. Bryan Casey teaches at Stanford Law School. Casey says that what a self-driving car does in a crash is not an ethical issue (问题) at all. Instead, it is a legal issue. If a driver has a crash now, the law decides if he was driving dangerously or if it was truly an accident. If the driver was dangerously careless, he faces punishment, often a fine or jail. If a breakdown caused the crash, the car makers might be at fault. Either way, laws exist to decide what is wrong, and who is responsible. Casey says that will not change with the arrival of self-driving cars.

We expect self-driving cars to be very safe, safer than human drivers because computers can react more quickly. And indeed, an autonomous vehicle should be well designed and slow down or speed up in relation to the actual case. However, accidents can always happen. This means that drivers, car makers, and lawmakers will need to deal with new problems as they appear.