Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The New World of Artificial Intelligence

As driverless cars become more independent, they will eventually face unpredictable situations where ethical decisions of life-or-death need to be made. Imagine a child chasing a basketball onto a road with an incoming driverless vehicle. An automated sharp swerve to avoid the child will endanger the passengers, but hitting the child is also wrong.  Who will be responsible for a mistake made? The programmer? The engineering team? The manufacturer? We can’t imprison or fine a car no matter how smart it is! I believe that artificial intelligence is highly beneficial, but it requires us to change our world. Having self-driving cars on the road must be accompanied by new branches in law, policymaking, and ethics. Just like Postman said in 1998, “Technological change is not additive, it is ecological.”[1] We don’t just have the world and artificial intelligence. We have a new world.

1.     Postman, Neil. "Five things we need to know about technological change." Retrieved December 1 (1998): 2003.

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