Carmakers are grappling with the dilemmas AI will face on the road
“When an individual has an incident, we can say, ‘They’re only human. They tried their best. It was an accident.’ We’re not going to be as forgiving with a company, and we probably shouldn’t be.”
— Melissa Cefkin, an anthropologist and lecturer in the department of general engineering at Santa Clara University who has worked with Nissan and Waymo on the interaction between humans and autonomous vehicles.
Engineers, programmers and bioethicists are grappling with several key questions. How well should driverless cars be required to “see” humans? How should driverless cars value the lives of nonhuman animals? What is the algorithmically appropriate trade-off between speed and safety?