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Safety criticism and ethical dilemma of autonomous vehicles

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Abstract

With the rapid commercialization of autonomous vehicles (AVs), opportunities and challenges co-exist. In the spring 2018, the first pedestrian fatality caused by Uber driverless vehicle drew global attention, through which two critical issues, safety criticism and ethical dilemma, emerge. In this work, safety quarrel and safety liability are investigated, and the ethical dilemma is discussed when AVs are confronted with collisions. Two reasons for the formation of the ethical dilemma are presented, and then, the feature that AVs makes ethical selection far from real scenes is discussed. To solve the issues, the countermeasures are put forth from the theory of deontology, utilitarianism, and machine learning approaches. Further discussion provides three possible solutions to safety liability and ethical dilemma, respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Wei Li, Yi Huang & Shichao Wang

  2. School of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Xuecai Xu

Authors
  1. Wei Li
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  2. Yi Huang
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  3. Shichao Wang
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  4. Xuecai Xu
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by [YH], [SW], and [XX]. The first draft of the manuscript was written by [WL] and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xuecai Xu.

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The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Li, W., Huang, Y., Wang, S. et al. Safety criticism and ethical dilemma of autonomous vehicles. AI Ethics 2, 869–874 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00128-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00128-2

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