Event

Artificial intelligence has brought about a renewed interest in the ethics of technology, and self-driving cars have been at the center of this development. There are at least two reasons for this development. First, autonomous vehicles bring about new important practical challenges that we want well thought-out answers to. Second, it so happens that self-driving cars illustrate some classic debates in ethics. This presentation will give an introduction to some approaches and concepts in the literatures on AI, technology, and self-driving cars, in order to open up further debate going forward how we best develop and integrate autonomous vehicles into our transportation systems.

Among the topics covered will be moral agency in machines, the concept of safety, trolley cases (of course), the philosophy of technology and empirical methods to make moral judgements. There is no preparation for the seminar, but, if one has not already done so, one would probably find spending 5-10 minutes doing the test on moralmachine.net well-spent time.