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in nearly five years of doing philosophy
tube I have never once mentioned the
trolley problem until today
part 1 99 problems but a trolley ain't
one self-driving cars apparently they're
gonna be big but the cars themselves
will probably be all different sizes but
as a phenomenon they are gonna be huge
and so are the ethical implications in
researching this episode I read a lot of
articles about the ethics of
self-driving cars or rather I've read
one article about the ethics of
self-driving cars which seems to have
been written about a dozen different
times by different people all across the
internet and that article talks about
self-driving cars and the trolley
problem the trolley problem if you
haven't heard of it is a staple of
undergraduate philosophy courses we're
going to talk about it and later on
we're gonna critique it first though for
those who haven't heard of it let me
bring you up to speed you are standing
next to a track along which runs
trolleys or trams and there is a trolley
coming along out of control you look
down the track and you see that it is
going to hit and kill five people
however you are standing next to the
switch that will cause it to change
track and if you so choose you can hit
that switch and save those five people
but on the other track there is one
person who will be hit and killed
what do if you leave it then five people
will die if you change it that only one
person dies but you have chosen to
deliberately kill that person rather
than let some people die
is it better to save the many or to obey
the rule that you shouldn't deliberately
kill people is there a moral difference
between killing and letting die or is
there some third option or
decision-making process these are the
questions that the trolley problem is
supposed to provoke and there are
millions of different versions sometimes
the one person is also terminally ill
sometimes the five people are all
violent criminals or they're old or the
young or the Nazis or whatever that's
when the trolley problem becomes trolley
problems part two too fast too curious
if you're very clever you'll already
have seen how this is relevant to
self-driving cars sometimes not often
but sometimes in real life there
no-win scenarios like the trolley
problem and human drivers when they
encounter them just have to make a
split-second decision but because a
self-driving car has to be programmed
ahead of time
something like an answer to something
like the trolley problem needs to be
arrived at by programmers before the
no-win scenario even comes up so here's
the first challenge imagine that we're
programming a self-driving car together
we're the philosophy and ethics team
that's been brought in to consult the
manufacturers and we've got two options
do we tell the computer to behave as a
human driver would there's a picture of
a human driver or do we tell it to
behave as we think a human driver should
you might prefer the second option after
all we already want self-driving cars to
be more efficient and safer than a human
driver why not also more moral than a
human driver but that's tough because
that means that we need to actually sit
down and solve the trolley problem so
the other option is that we tell the
computer just do whatever a human being
would do we take a bunch of drivers we
put them in simulations of accidents and
no-win scenarios we record what they do
and we tell the computer just just do
that that way the computer should at
least be no more evil behind the wheel
than a human would be presumably that
may not actually be what people want
them according to psychologist Daniel
caiman people prefer a negative outcome
to be the result of a human making a bad
decision rather than a negative outcome
of the same value to be the result of a
computer just making a statistically bad
call we prefer having someone to blame
even if that means we'll be blaming them
more often
for instance in certain circumstances
medical diagnostic algorithms can be
more accurate than GPS but even when
told that patients tend to prefer a
human doctor to do their diagnosis
because if they get it wrong there's
someone to blame and it feels like
something can be done if the computer
gets it wrong then it's just a brute
fact that point two percent of the time
or whatever it farts out the wrong
answer
and there's nothing you can do which
isn't as comforting there might be some
other problems with asking autonomous
vehicles to imitate human behavior to
can our practical ethical
decision-making principles be expressed
as the kind of hard and fast rules that
a computer requires the philosopher
Herbert Dreyfus thinks that they can't
and that's why I said the computers
would presumably be no more evil than a
person Dreyfus thinks that we don't make
decisions according to ironclad rules
the way that computers do we can model
human behavior using an algorithm but
being able to model something using an
algorithm isn't the same as that thing
actually being run by an algorithm you
can predict the weather using an
algorithm but the weather is not
governed by an algorithm maybe our
practical ethical decision-making in an
emergency like a road traffic accident
or a trolley problem isn't actually
consistent we know that things like
implicit bias exist and the human
decision-making can be affected by what
kind of stuff like what kind of mood
you're in and whether you had a cup of
coffee this morning and stuff that
philosophically speaking shouldn't be
relevant which means that if we try to
find these principles in a simulation
and teach them to a computer we may not
be able to find them or worse we might
find bad principles and hand them on PBS
idea channel have already done great
work on how machines and algorithms can
inherit bias even racism from their
human creators because technology is
created by us and it reflects our ideas
and values having reviewed the
literature I think there's a real risk
of ethical complacency here for instance
this article in ie spectrum by Noah
Goodall says the ethics of road vehicle
automation is a solvable problem we know
this because other fields have handled
comparable risks and benefits in a safe
and reasonable way donated organs are
distributed to the sick based on metrics
based on quality adjusted life years and
disability adjusted life years among
other variables and the military draft
has added exemptions for certain useful
professions such as farmer and teacher
and I don't know if I missed a memo or
something but last time I checked the
ethical issues surrounding disability
quality adjusted life years medical
resources and military conscription have
deaf
not been solved I mean I haven't checked
Twitter since this morning so maybe they
have recently but the idea that we can
just look at how other people tackle
ethical issues and then apply them to
this presumes that those other ethical
issues have in fact been solved it also
assumes that ethical issues can in fact
be solved rather than just approached in
his book click here to save everything
the writer Evgeny Morozov cautions that
technology and tech development
conditions us to think about the world
in terms of problems and solutions
solutions in the engineering sense are
unambiguous they are specific to a
well-defined given problem you get the
same output for every same input and
something either works or it isn't a
solution but some problems aren't like
that they can't be solved they will
always be ambiguous context dependent to
a degree relative perhaps and have pros
and cons to every move that we might
make which might even cause us to
reconsider how we visualize the problem
crime is an excellent example we won't
ever solve crime if we were to totally
eliminate crime altogether then that
will be horrible we have to be living in
some sort of totalitarian society and
sometimes crime can be good even morally
necessary crime arises from very complex
social conditions some of which we want
to keep and so we can't really solve it
we can just approach it and weigh the
pros and cons of our approaches we're
very used to technology and tech
development being presented as solutions
and morozov's says that when all you've
got is a big hammer all your ethical
problems start to look like nails part
three
who the heck even rides trolleys trolley
problems come up a lot and there are a
lot of articles that just do what I did
in part one mention that they exist
explain them and say they're relevant to
self-driving cars but are they our
trolley problems even useful at all one
criticism of trolley problems is that
all the possible outcomes are known
the trolley either kills five or it
kills one which is a scenario quite
unlike actual moral decision-making
where we are always certain about what
the consequences will be and we have to
take a best-guess trolley problems also
make moral decision-making out to be
very individualistic whereas in real
life we might also want to ask questions
about the conditions that shape our
ethical dilemmas in their article the
trolley problem will tell you nothing
useful about morality
Briona Rennicks and Nathan Robinson
right we should spend far more time
inquiring into the trolley company's
lackadaisical attitude to safety
precautions and whether it's morally
justified to cut down on voluntary brake
inspections in order to decrease
operating costs and maximize quarterly
profits obviously that quote is a little
bit facetious but the point is sometimes
how we arrive in an ethical dilemma can
be just as important as if not more
important than the ethical dilemma
itself for instance at time of filming
in this very city the autonomous nation
of anarchist libertarians or Anil for
short have taken over a 15 million pound
mansion in Eaton square the mansion
belongs to a Russian billionaire who
owns I think four or five mansions in
the UK and it's been empty for months
they've taken over and converted it into
a homeless shelter technically illegal
but doing something nice for somebody
else oh isn't it a philosophical dilemma
philosophy class 101 right 500 words on
this decision and put it on my desk on
Monday morning but hang on a minute
let's think about the background ethical
conditions you telling me there are
empty houses and homeless people why how
do we get to that situation why do
people become homeless in the first
place you see how the original question
like the trolley problem takes the
elements of the question as a given and
by focusing just on an individual
decision we can miss some of the richer
issues that surround and create the
question itself in a similar vein the
trolley problem also presents a scenario
in which doing the right thing whatever
you decide that is doesn't cost you
anything
materially whereas in real life it might
turn out that the right thing to do is
the less profitable thing to do at least
some other time
concerns like this lead Rennicks and
Robinson to
say that this makes the trolley problem
the perfect philosophy question for the
neoliberal era since it reduces
everything to individual choice and
tells us there is no alternative to
existing power structures so what are
the background ethical issues of
self-driving cars
well the ethics of the companies that
make them for one thing
uber for instance has broken the law in
California by illegally testing
self-driving cars on public roads
according to the Attorney General
Uber's whole business model is to
exploit the loopholes in labor laws to
dominate the transport market in major
cities across the world flooding them
with underpaid exploited drivers to
smash the competition whilst dodging or
just breaking existing regulations when
they've done that they'll fire all of
their drivers and replace them with
self-driving cars to make all the money
in the world you know how Ober keeps
trying to say oh our drivers aren't
employees they're independent
contractors yeah that's because if you
were legally an employee you would have
some rights when they eventually replace
you with a self-driving car and they
don't want that they want you to build
Ebor into a global brand but then keep
all the profit you made them for
themselves here's another important
background ethical question let's say
there's a human driver driving along and
a kid runs out into the road the driver
swerves to avoid hitting the kid mounts
the curb and hits you you're a
pedestrian just walking along minding
your own business when BAM if you want
to you can take that human driver to
court you might not win but you can hold
them accountable
you can require them to stand up in
public and defend that decision so let's
imagine that instead of a human driver
it's now a self-driving car if you think
about it it's the same scenario except
that the decision to swerve and hit you
was made months ago by some computer
programmer who programmed the car to
weigh risks and outcomes in that way
remember they're not really autonomous
vehicles they're just unsupervised
they're not really driverless they're
just pre driven can you take the
computer programmer to court or the
company that made the car because if you
can't then some software company has
just been given the unaccountable power
of life and death over you
now that is a trolley problem we've
departed somewhat from trolley problems
so are they really useful useful for
what useful for deciding what we should
do
arguably not useful as a realistic
simulation of genuine ethical dilemmas
arguably not useful for revealing
people's inner moral instincts yeah may
be useful as a teaching tool for
comparing various ethical theories and
as a scaffold for introducing you to the
ethics of self-driving cars definitely
and in the spirit of afghani more azov
I'm not going to conclude by offering a
solution I'm just going to leave you to
discuss your various approaches in the
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