Autonomous vehicles are one of the most interesting topics in human-robot interaction right now. While they are not humanoid in shape, they are one of the biggest, deadliest and most promising robots available to the general public. They have the potential to dramatically change how we get from point a to b and what infrastructure we need. But they also raises many ethical issues besides a long list of technical challenges.

Driving a car is inherently dangerous once you drive at a practical speed. Your autonomous vehicle needs to be able to deal with all sorts of traffic situations, weather conditions and even unpredictable human operators. This is an enormous challenge.

I talked with Professor Robert Sparrow from the Monarch University, Professor Tracy Hresko Pearl and Professor Alan R. Wagner about the future of transportation with autonomous vehicles. The core question is: when will it become illegal for humans to drive cars?

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant links:

* When human beings are like drunk robots: driverless vehicles, ethics, and the future of transport by Robert Sparrow* Compensation at the Crossroads: AutonomousVehicles & Alternative Victim CompensationSchemes by Tracy Pearl* The Moral Machine Experiment by Awad, Edmond and Dsouza, Sohan and Kim, Richard and Schulz, Jonathan and Henrich, Joseph and Shariff, Azim and Bonnefon, Jean-François and Rahwan, Iyad

Transcript:

Welcome to the human-robot interaction Podcast. I’m your host, Christophe Bartneck, and I’m fascinated with how humans and robots interact with each other. In this series we will explore this relationship with philosophers, engineers, psychologists and artists. We will look into the ethical implications off this new technology and how we can make it work for humans. We will shine light on the technologies that make robots intelligent and useful. We will also look at the people behind the science. Why are they interested in human-robot interaction? What career path did they take? And what does it mean to be a postgraduate student in this area? This is a lot of ground to cover. So let’s get started with one of the most interesting topics in human-robot interaction right now. Autonomous vehicles. While they are not human in shape they are one off the biggest, deadliest and most promising robots available to the general public. They have the potential to dramatically change how we get from point A to B and what infrastructure we need. But they also raise many ethical issues besides a long list off technical challenges In France, Germany and England, terrorists used vehicles as weapons and drove them into crowds of people, killing and injuring many. At the same time, hackers were able to remote control the Jeep Cherokee. This does raise considerable security concerns. Driving a car is inherently dangerous once you drive at a practical speed. The autonomous vehicle needs to be able to deal with all sorts of traffic situations, weather conditions and even unpredictable human operators. This is an enormous challenge. Despite the recent advances that Waymo and practically every major car manufacturer made, we did already encounter several fatalities with autonomous vehicles. In 2018 an Uber car with switched on auto pilot even killed a pedestrian crossing th...