Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2019 Symposium (2020)
Chapter: Self-Driving Cars: Technology and Ethics - Christoffer Heckman and Hae-Jong Seo
Self-Driving Cars: Technology and Ethics
CHRISTOFFER HECKMAN
University of Colorado Boulder
HAE-JONG SEO
NVIDIA
Self-driving cars are already taking to the roads, but the technology behind them is still far from fully understood or developed. The challenges ahead for researchers and industry are complex. To overcome them, scientific and engineering breakthroughs combined with fundamental changes in how the public perceives transportation as a service are required. The potential effects on infrastructure, the economy, and society are challenging to quantify due to the number of ways transportation factors into daily life. In response to recent high-profile disasters involving self-driving vehicles, including some that have led to loss of life, there has been an intensified focus on these vehicles’ capabilities. Simultaneously, the ethical implications of handing off safety-critical applications to increasingly sophisticated autonomy algorithms have become the subject of intense debate.
The first speaker, Christoffer Heckman (University of Colorado Boulder) provided an overview of the opportunities and challenges presented by self-driving cars.1 Next, Tae Eun Choe (Baidu) introduced the concept of self-driving vehicles and how they are being developed at scale. Then, John Basl (Northeastern University) explored conversations in philosophy and ethics related to the development of self-driving cars and the technologies and programming that support them. The session closed with a talk by Dorsa Sadigh (Stanford University) about human drivers, their interactions with autonomous and intelligent systems in other vehicles on the shared road, and the societal implications of those interactions.
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1 Paper not included in this volume.
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