How should an autonomous car optimize crashes?

Photo by Roland Dobbins, Wikimedia

A couple of months ago Dr. Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, wrote an article on autonomous cars. The article, titled “The Robot Car of Tomorrow May Just Be Programmed to Hit You”, discussed intricate challenges and implications of developing collision optimization algorithms for autonomous cars.

He points out that, regardless of how rarely an autonomous car may come across unavoidable collision situations, the implications of building an algorithm that determines how it responds to the collision lie in the domain of ethics and needs much discussion.

Join us in discussing the topic by taking the poll below. As usual, we’ll present the results of this poll in two weeks.