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Would You Pull The Trolley Switch Analysis

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In this age of groundbreaking technology and completely autonomous cars, we are faced with several new morally challenging questions. This is the future and we have to answer them. If we don’t, we run the risk of never advancing as a species. Lauren Davis concurs with this statement in her article “Would You Pull the Trolley Switch? Does it Matter?” written in The Atlantic “you eventually reach a point where you have to make some decisions, and not everybody will agree.” Whose life should be valued more? In the following situation: a completely autonomous car on a collision course with a pedestrian(s), and the only other option is to swerve and kill the passenger(s). Who should the car protect? In most scenario variations, the car default should be programmed to swerve and kill the passenger with the expectations of unbuckled passengers and infant/pregnant passengers. Imagine if you were behind the wheel, and there was no way to stop in time. You were going the speed limit. You kept your eyes on the road. You followed all the laws. But your choices would still be either hitting them or swerving and killing yourself. Cars don’t have the luxury of emotions to control what they do. All they have are algorithms. If someone stepped in front of the car, the car should assess what the safest course of action would be. To avoid the pedestrian at …show more content…

And I’m not sure that’s the best thing,” says Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. These situations are terrible, and nobody likes the thought of a car that kills, but these decisions must be made if there is no human being behind the wheel. So why not make them to follow the law. If a person was driving, it’s a reflex to swerve if safely possible. Modeling the car's decisions after human’s reactions is the most ethical way to handle the swerve or hit issue with completely autonomous

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