SAFER seminar: Automated Vehicle Regulation Needs to Speak to Code, not to Humans: Keeping Safety and Ethics in the Public Domain
Welcome to a SAFER seminar in with Leon Sütfeld and Joshua Bronson, RISE (plus a law professor from Munich)! They will present their recent research - a paper on the state of regulations for AV trajectory decisions in the EU: “Automated Vehicle Regulation Needs to Speak to Code, not to Humans: Keeping Safety and Ethics in the Public Domain”. The paper is published in Philosophy & Technology.
At this seminar the authors will present their main conclusions and engage in a dialogue with you about the results.
Abstract
“In anticipation of the market introduction of highly and fully automated vehicles, regulations for their behavior in public road traffic are emerging in various countries and regions. Yet, as we show using the example of EU and German regulations, these rules are both incomplete and exceptionally vague. In this paper we introduce three traffic scenarios highlighting conflicting ethical, legal, and utility-related claims, and perform a legal analysis with regards to the expected behavior of AVs in these scenarios. We show that the existing regulatory framework disregards the realities of algorithmic decision-making in automated vehicles, such as the incomplete and imprecise perception of their environment and the probabilistic nature of their predictions. Importantly, the current regulations are written in abstract language addressing human interpreters rather than the precise logical-numerical computer code. We argue that the required interpretation and translation of the abstract legal language into the logical-numerical domain is so ambiguous that the regulations as they stand fail to guide or limit automated vehicle behavior in any meaningful way. This comes with significant ethical implications, as the interpretation and translation is unavoidable and, if not provided by regulatory bodies, will have to be performed by manufacturers. We argue that ethical decisions with significant impact on public safety must not be delegated to private companies, and thus, regulatory frameworks need significant improvements.”
Link to full paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-025-00846-z
A warm welcome to the dialogue!
________________________________________________________________________________
Microsoft TeamsNeed help?
Meeting ID: 342 740 285 849
Passcode: 8gM9vq7m
For organizers: Meeting options
________________________________________________________________________________
