Toward a rational and ethical sociotechnical system of autonomous vehicles: A novel application of multi-criteria decision analysis.

The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment of the harms and benefits of their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts to assess the significance of 13 potential harms and eight potential benefits that might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, we considered: (1) the status quo, i.e., no AVs are deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, i.e., no regulatory control would be exercised and commercial entities would "push" the development and deployment; (3) regulated introduction, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and either private individuals or commercial fleet operators could own the AVs; and (4) fleets only, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and only commercial fleet operators could own the AVs. Our results suggest that two of these scenarios, (3) and (4), namely regulated privately-owned introduction or fleet ownership or autonomous vehicles would be less likely to cause harm than either the status quo or the unfettered options.

Drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes.

When an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hear about it? Here we asked human participants to consider hypothetical cases in which a pedestrian was killed by a car operated under shared control of a primary and a secondary driver and to indicate how blame should be allocated. We find that when only one driver makes an error, that driver is blamed more regardless of whether that driver is a machine or a human. However, when both drivers make errors in cases of human-machine shared-control vehicles, the blame attributed to the machine is reduced. This finding portends a public under-reaction to the malfunctioning artificial intelligence components of automated cars and therefore has a direct policy implication: allowing the de facto standards for shared-control vehicles to be established in courts by the jury system could fail to properly regulate the safety of those vehicles; instead, a top-down scheme (through federal laws) may be called for.

The right to a human in the loop: Political constructions of computer automation and personhood.

Contributing to recent scholarship on the governance of algorithms, this article explores the role of dignity in data protection law addressing automated decision-making. Delving into the historical roots of contemporary disputes between information societies, notably European Union and Council of Europe countries and the United States, reveals that the regulation of algorithms has a rich, culturally entrenched, politically relevant backstory. The article compares the making of law concerning data protection and privacy, focusing on the role automation has played in the two regimes. By situating diverse policy treatments within the cultural contexts from which they emerged, the article uncovers and examines two different legal constructions of automated data processing, one that has furnished a right to a human in the loop that is intended to protect the dignity of the data subject and the other that promotes and fosters full automation to establish and celebrate the fairness and objectivity of computers. The existence of a subtle right across European countries and its absence in the US will no doubt continue to be relevant to international technology policy as smart technologies are introduced in more and more areas of society.