Self-driving cars, are they ethical?

 Not a physiology post but this is cool:

AI has always been a hot-topic for as long as I can remember, as with anything that sounds futuristic that we as a society are closer to attaining and harnessing for our own gain. I remember my father showing me the movie ‘iRobot’, when I was a kid, and legitimately being afraid of these autonomous, humanoid, beings, that slowly turned against Will Smith over the course of the film. But even before this feature film of 2004, the 80s and 90s were strewn with references to robotic overlords. Blade Runner in 82’, The Terminator in 84’, and The Matrix in 99’ all point towards imminent war, chaos, and destruction as technology advances and our greed gets the best of us. Time after time, Hollywood has taken the opportunity to orientate AI as an end game for humanity. Machines reaching their final destination and eventually eclipsing us entirely, much less being within our iron-fisted control. I think that this stigma in pop culture has brought us to the position we see ourselves in today. Take self-driving cars, for example. According to a study done at the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan, in 2015, autonomous vehicles, or AVs got into more accidents than conventional vehicles. The rate was actually surprisingly high with AVs coming in at 9.1 crashes per million miles driven, and conventional vehicles at 4.1 crashes per million miles driven. But the problem here is that there is still too little data to do a fair analysis of absolute safety between AVs and regular cars. And to put things back into perspective, every time a Tesla, or other AV gets into a minor fender-bender, it seems that there is a news story surrounding the incident pointing out how dangerous self-driving cars are. I think that part of the issue is people’s need for control and aversion to giving it up. We see that a machine that is still in development makes a mistake, and immediately think back to the movies of our childhood and write them off as dangerous and unhinged vehicles, when in reality they are simply a new technology that has room to grow. I think that numbers this promising, so early in the life of these vehicles show a safe a bright future for EVs. I think there is a lot of good to come of self-driving cars, and I don’t think we should let emotions get in the way of progress, so long as it is safe.

http://websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2015-34_Abstract_English.pdf