Join Schwartz Reisman postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Wald as he facilitates a biweekly discussion of issues in AI by using fiction—films, TV shows, short stories—to deepen our ability imagine possible futures that already confront us, and envision the impacts of artificial intelligence.
In this session, we discuss Cory Doctorow’s “Car Wars,” a short story that discusses the ethics of self-driving cars. But you will find no trolley problems here—Doctorow’s main concern is not with what ethics our cars should have, but with the unspoken assumption in the debate that it should not be up to the driver what ethics, and hence what software, their self-driving car runs.
Doctorow’s story dramatizes the potential dangers of a world in which we entrust our lives to devices that are designed to disobey us, and to carry out the instructions of those who think they know best. For the optional companion piece, we’ll look at an argument in favor of mandatory ethics systems in self driving cars.
Primary reading: Cory Doctorow, “Car Wars”
Optional secondary reading: J. Gogoll, J.F. Müller. “Autonomous Cars: In Favor of a Mandatory Ethics Setting.” Sci Eng Ethics 23, 681–700 (2017).