HAI Weekly Seminar with Todd Karhu - Occupant-Favoring Autonomous Vehicles

Occupant-Favoring Autonomous Vehicles

Good news! The near future has arrived and you’re ready to purchase your first fully autonomous vehicle. You have narrowed down your search to a few manufacturers and have just one decision left to make: How would you like your vehicle to respond if it finds itself in a potential collision with other autonomous vehicles? If, like most people, you care more about your own safety and that of your friends and family than you care about the safety of strangers on the road, you will understandably be drawn to a vehicle that is programmed to be, at least to some degree, occupant-favoring. Such a vehicle would tend to select courses of action that reduce harm to its own passengers in a crash, even when doing so means that a greater harm will befall the occupants of other vehicles. Because most consumers are like you, occupant-favoring vehicles will soon dominate the market if they are not regulated. In this talk, which draws on a joint project with Tomi Francis (Oxford), Todd Karhu will discuss reasons for and against a regulatory ban on occupant-favoring vehicles, including the possibility that if no passengers are allowed to operate occupant-favoring vehicles, every passenger will be safer than if all do.