For Autonomous Vehicles, Saving Thousands of Lives Means Making the Tough Choices

There’s a scare story about autonomous vehicles that may be coming soon to a highway near you.

But when you dissect that story, it translates into a powerful argument for a set of technologies that could soon be saving thousands of lives per year on America’s roads.

A couple of weeks ago, Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, carried a story that brought the development of autonomous vehicles out of the world of engineering and into the realm of ethics. It reported on a University of Oregon research team that envisioned roadway situations where a fatal crash was inevitable, then asked members of the public how comfortable they were with a computer deciding who lived and who died.

"There's this trade-off between the interests of the driver, or rather the passenger who buys the car, and the level of public acceptance versus public outrage," said Azim Shariff of UO’s Culture and Morality Lab. "Car companies are not going to be able to figure out what to do unless they know people's psychology on this."  

Imagining the Worst

Shariff, working with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in France, surveyed 900 people “to test public attitudes on the cold, hard decisions computer programs will have to make when lives are on the line,” CBC reported.

“The situations involved a car hurtling toward a group of up to 10 pedestrians, with the only options hitting them or driving into a barrier and killing the passenger inside. The number of pedestrians varied among scenarios, as did whether the person facing that situation was in the car, one of the pedestrians, or a casual observer.” Other variables include the presence of children or seniors, in the car or in the crosswalk.

"People at least they say they'd be willing to go with the more utilitarian option," Shariff told CBC. "That's especially the case when they're going to be the pedestrians. So they don't want these cars to be willing to drive over 10 people." About 25% of respondents said the car should save them in all circumstances, even if it meant pedestrians would die.

But as autonomous vehicles begin to show up on real roadways, and gradually make their way onto tolled highways, bridges, and tunnels, it’s important to put the story in context.

The Bigger Picture

CBC acknowledges that “driverless cars will be far better at avoiding collisions than humans. A recent report on autonomous vehicles prepared by the Conference Board of Canada predicts an 80% reduction in traffic fatalities in an era when driverless cars rule the road.”

That won’t be the reaction when media show up to cover a crash. You can see the headlines now: TOLL ROAD PLAYS GOD.

But those headlines would miss the point, said Joe Waggoner, Executive Director of the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority and one of IBTTA’s leading authorities on autonomous vehicles.

“It’s a philosophical discussion, and I didn’t major in philosophy,” Waggoner told Tolling Points this week. “But if we’re looking at 30,000 to 36,000 highway deaths per year and I’m aware of a technology that’s out there today and can significantly reduce those numbers that might be the real ethical question.

“In other words…How can you not be supportive and not try to make use of that technology in a safe and effective way?”

An autonomous vehicle “can assess a situation and take action 10 times faster than a human faced with the same kind of dilemma,” Waggoner noted. That means a computer will be better able to avoid more fatal situations. And when the worst happens, its optimized response won’t be “some random reaction that results in the same or greater catastrophic result.”

Which makes the CBC report a future case study in crisis communications, not an argument against an essential highway safety technology.

Click here for results of the media and crisis communications training at IBTTA’s recent New Media, Communications and Human Resources Conference.

Click here for a link to IBTTA’s Automated and Connected Vehicle Webinar that took place on November 10, 2015.