Robin Chase on policies to ensure that autonomous vehicles serve the public good (“Will a World of Driverless Cars Be Heaven or Hell?”):
So policy makers, taxpayers, road warriors, city lovers: Which path forward will we choose? Our future hinges on two things. First, will the cost for autonomous vehicles be high enough that each vehicle will need to be used well? If so, the economic imperative to share the cars will set us down the efficient-use path. Second, will we add a per-mile fee for human-free passenger vehicles? We will need that to temper our insatiable desire to send machines out to do our bidding.
Tom Chatfield on the laws of robotics-type dilemmas that arise (“Automated ethics”):
If my self-driving car is prepared to sacrifice my life in order to save multiple others, this principle should be made clear in advance together with its exact parameters. …
As agency passes out of the hands of individual human beings, in the name of various efficiencies, the losses outside these boxes don’t simply evaporate into non-existence. If our destiny is a new kind of existential insulation – a world in which machine gatekeepers render certain harms impossible and certain goods automatic – this won’t be because we will have triumphed over history and time, but because we will have delegated engagement to something beyond ourselves.
