It doesn’t happen too often that a new technology is developed that causes a paradigm shift throughout the world, but we are at the very cusp of such a shift. I’m talking, of course, about self driving cars.

Although self driving cars or autonomous vehicles are already a reality and people are already quite familiar with the technology and may have even used it, they are still not mainstream as the technology itself needs a lot of work before your conventional car can be replaced for good.

Companies like Tesla and Google have played an instrumental role in the development of such cars and have brought them from the realm of science fiction to reality much sooner than anyone had expected. I certainly was surprised when I came to know that they were already on roads, this early in the 21st century.

Anyways, as with any revolutionary technology such as this, there are a million questions attached to it and a technology that is supposed to make decisions on its own and for us, there arise some really deep questions pertaining to what we think are unique to us humans like ethics and morals.

Moral Decisions Made By A Machine?

Each year hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives in road accidents throughout their world. It is said that most of these accidents are due to human error. That is where the self driving cars step in.

Since autonomous vehicles will have computing power that could take much faster decisions than us, and since future autonomous vehicles could be interconnected, we could see a reduction of 90% in road accidents after the world has switched to self driving cars.

However, accidents will still happen because technology, no matter how cutting edge, still fails from time to time. The problem here is that, in this case, lives are involved and split second decision making that can decide someone’s fate.

And for the first time, we will be relying on machines to make the ethical and moral decisions for us. Can we really build them to that degree where they can do that? How would a machine even decide?

Which Life To Spare?

Let’s say you are in an autonomous car and suddenly there comes a small child running in front of the car. Now there are only two options that the car has. Either to steer right or to steer left, because applying the brakes would still mean colliding with the child.

Now, let’s say that steering left kills pedestrians while steering right causes the car to collide with other cars and killing the passengers in the car. What does the car do?

Many experts have suggested that an autonomous car should take such a decision where the least possible lives are lost and while that sounds perfectly logical, would people want to be in a car, where they could be killed by the car to save other people, while in reality human drivers do the exact opposite and try to save themselves first?

Moreover, would it be ok to let a child get killed to save an adult’s life? We are reaching the depths of our human thoughts and feelings and maybe we should be questioning our own morality before encoding anything into the machines first.