Moral Agency

“The Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts is a collection of five rules, championed by Keith Miller (2011) and other computer scientists, engineers, and ethicists (Ad Hoc Committee 2010). These Rules were crafted to provide guidance to the computing and engineering communities especially with respect to pervasive and autonomous technologies.”

Borenstein, Herkert & Miller, 2019)

Are self driving cars capable of making an autonomous decision on the moral compass or does it not care about the moral responsibility that had been hardwired into it by the creators.

Let’s investigate the methodology underlying decision-making in self-driving cars.

  1.  Is self-driving cars are capable of making fully autonomous decisions without human input?
  2. all outputs produced by self-driving vehicles are human-influenced?

Google’s autonomous navigation system

LIDAR (light-sensing radar) used by Google car that detects the external environment and analyzes the position of the vehicle in relation to surrounding objects. Self-driving cars seem to suggest that they are able to calculate decisions based on the environment that they sense. However, this decision-making is heavily dependent upon datasets used to train these navigation systems. These include “highly detailed, three-dimensional, computerized maps  which can pinpoint a car’s location and understand its surroundings. Human researchers and data scientists produce these digital representations in order to help the self-driving car to make the decisions.

Moral agency: autonomy, intentionality, and responsibility

Moral agency is an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on the internal notion of right and wrong and can be held accountable for these actions.

“When Is a Robot a Moral Agent?” by John P. Sullins’s three conditions are useful to evaluate the moral agency of self-driving cars.

  • Autonomy is that the self-driving car should not control directly by any agent.
  • Intentionality is the ability of the self-driving car to act intentionally to do good or harm.
  • Responsibility is the ability to comprehend its larger role and its duty within transportation services.

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