IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 44

Nonetheless, we make many driving decisions of lesser
ethical import every day. We chose to exceed the speed
limit by 5 mph, cross a double yellow line to avoid a
pothole, speed just long enough to pass a slow moving
car, roll-stop a stop sign when nobody is around. If vehicle manufacturers were to program their cars to do
these sorts of things, they would need to accept liability
for traffic citations. Yet it seems that, as free agents, we
have the right to decide for ourselves when circumstances make a rule petty. Whether trivial or profound,
there are occasions when pedestrians, bicyclists, bad
roads, weather, faulty vehicles, or other drivers create
circumstances demanding decisions that challenge the
ethical underpinnings of human drivers - decisions
that, for fully autonomous vehicles, would be preordained in the software. Who is to determine those preordained decisions? Software engineers? Their
managers? Attorneys? Government bureaucrats? Legislative committees?

Something in Between All-or-Nothing
We might want to consider a solution that preserves
some vestige of the liberty - and associated responsibility - we now enjoy with respect to our freedom to
choose how we will be transported from place to place.
In the near future, many if not most of us will, on occasion, cede control of driving functions to the vehicles
we ride in. Yet, we need not cede command. Perhaps
the ethical choices that automated systems make
should be open to advance selection by the humans
riding in and commanding those vehicles. In practice
such advance selection would be no more complicated
than taking a written driver's license exam, except
there are no "right" and "wrong" answers. The ethical
commitments of a person wishing to command autonomous vehicles can be determined via a series of questions requiring ethical choices under differing and
difficult driving circumstances - call it a "command
profile." Of course, every possible driving scenario cannot be explored this way. There are too many of them.
Nonetheless, the queries could be structured to cover
classes of scenarios such that autonomous vehicles are
subsequently instructed to make choices commensurate with the ethical commitments of the designated
commander. The distillation of those commitments into
a digital code would be scanned into the autonomous
vehicle as a person takes command. In practice this
would be as simple as swiping a credit card or entering
user login credentials.
What is the down side? Utilitarian minded folks
might complain that facilitating human command of
these automated systems would allow people to make
poor choices falling short of the greater good ideal. On
the other side, liber tarian minded folks might

complain the command profiles would allow people to
make poor choices violating the rights of innocents.
These objections, of course, talk past the fact that
most people already are licensed to command and
control manual vehicles. If the worry about preserving
some vestige of human command is that people in
general are not good at making ethical choices, we
then need to ask, who will alternately decide the "correct" choices to be universally codified into vehicle
automation systems? As pointed out by philosophers
David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan in response to a
proposal that people are better off when their choices
are limited, "...if people are no good at running their
own lives, letting them run other people's lives does
not solve the problem" [24]. By separating command
from control and preserving command as a human
function bearing on otherwise autonomous vehicles,
we trust ourselves to continue doing what only our species seems able to do - wrestle with the unyielding
ambiguity of ethical choice.

Author Information
Tom Fournier is the Chief Technology Officer at Opus
Inspection, a medium-size, technology based, international company performing vehicle safety and emissions testing on behalf of local governments. Email:
tom444fournier@gmail.com. Additional publications by
Tom can be found at www.tfournier.com.

References
[1] National Conference of State Legislatures, "Autonomous|Self-Driving
Vehicles Legislation," Oct. 7, 2015; http://www.ncsl.org/research/
transportation/autonomous-vehicles-legislation.aspx#Enacted Autonomous Vehicle Legislation, accessed Dec. 8, 2015.
[2] E. Juliussen, "Self-driving cars vs. driverless cars," presented at
Automotive Tech.AD 2015, Nov. 16-17, 2015.
[3] National Center for Statistics and Analysis, "2014 Crash Data Key Findings" (Traffic Safety Facts Crash.Stats), Rep. no. DOT HS 812 219. Washington DC: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2015.
[4] S. Singh, "Critical Reasons for Crashes Investigated in the National
Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey" (Traffic Safety Facts Crash.Stats),
Rep. no. DOT HS 812 115. Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration, 2015.
[5] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Traffic Safety Facts 2012, A
Compilation of Motor Vehicle Crash Data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System," Rep. no. DOT HS 812 032.
Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2012.
[6] V. de Rugy, "War in the middle east have cost taxpayers almost
$1.7 trillion," Mercatus Center, George Mason University, January 21,
2015; http://mercatus.org/publication/wars-middle-east-have-costtaxpayers-almost-17-trillion, accessed Dec. 6, 2015.
[7] J. Jones and E. Bower, "American deaths in terrorism vs. gun violence
in one graph," CNN, Oct. 2, 2015; http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/
oregon-shooting-terrorism-gun-violence/, accessed Dec. 8, 2015.
[8] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "U.S. Department of
Transportation Releases Policy on Automated Vehicle Development,"
Rep. no. NHTSA 14-13. Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, 2013.
[9] "Google Self-Driving Car Project," Google.com, 2016; https://www.
google.com/selfdrivingcar/.
[10] J. Kiss, "Uber: 'We'll ease the transition to self-driving cars',",
theguardian, Sept. 16, 2015; http://www.theguardian.com/

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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june 2016

http://www.tfournier.com http://www.ncsl.org/research/ http://www.Tech.AD http://www.mercatus.org/publication/wars-middle-east-have-cost http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/ http://www.Google.com https://www http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/ http://www.theguardian.com/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016