The future is a blurred image it isn’t showing what it stores for us, some great technological advances that can ease our tasks or completely replace us, but one thing is for sure, those driverless cars are no longer a scene out of a sci-fi movie, it is in the near future. As far as our wildest imaginations have taken us a world of driverless cars would mean lesser time being wasted in driving, safer roads as these cars reduce human error and thus will reduce the number of casualties caused every year due to traffic accidents. So we are ready for the driverless cars to drive out of stores, or are we??

The ethical dilemma, imagine your car is on a road and it’s about to bump into a truck, does the car stay and endanger your life, does it move into the left lane and crash into an SUV and minimize risk or crash into a scooterist in the right lane that would kill him but not you, how does the car decide, if a human was to be in this situation he wouldn’t really think about it as a decision and do it as an instinct an unconscious decision based on his ethics and faiths so technically he shouldn’t be punished for it. But a robot doesn’t have instincts and thus any decision is predetermined but on what basis save more even if it means endangering the passengers or reduce harm or prioritize the safety of those inside the car. A solution may be that we allow the consumer to make this particular choice at the time of purchase but then how do we justify giving a person or a retailer the power to decide about whether another person survives a future accident or not? Another solution is to try to minimize the harm caused but would that mean that the car hits a motorist A wearing a helmet against another motorist B not wearing one, so we are basically penalising the motorist A  for doing the right thing  or we  are endangering motorist B and taking the deliberate decision of killing him  because he forgot his helmet? So does that mean these cars should be illegal and their creators and programmers should be locked up??

Well, I think that driverless cars challenge our basic understanding of right and wrong what a human does in panic may be right when the same thing was done by a robot as a reaction it may be considered wrong. I feel that we need to accept that these situations will have responses which I feel should be based on the owners’ ethics as that is what their decisions would have been based upon. Thus however unethical it may sound we need to give the consumers the choice because that is the only one we’ve got.