The technical difficulties around the development of driverless cars have almost been solved, but what about the philosophical ones? Because the real question might not be whether the first autonomous vehicle will be Volvo or Google, but whether it will be a deontological ethicist or a consequentialist.
A scientist from Stanford University, who has already created the first driverless car that can beat a human around a racetrack, has brought in a philosopher to his team to deal with a far more thorny problem: how to teach the car to make ethical judgments.
One of the key ways in which philosophy has interacted with driverless cars has been to consider an update of the “trolley problem”. A train is approaching five people on a track.