The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

12.12. Autonomous Cars

By Jason Danker, December 2015.

Overview. Automation in cars is nothing new. Automatic transmissions and cruise control have been around since 1939 and 1958 respectively, but these systems serve to aid, rather than replace, human drivers. What is new is a near future potential for fully autonomous cars, cars that are capable of full operation without an attending human driver.

While other vehicles, such as light rail and monorail trains, have been capable of fully automatic operation since 1967, these vehicles have the luxury of operating in closed environments and only need to be able to respond to a defined set of inputs. Autonomous cars do not have this luxury. In operating “in the wild,” the systems guiding these cars may be forced to respond to any number of unanticipated situations. As the automation system cannot enumerate all possible situations, it must instead rely on continuous organization of its operating environment.

This is clearly a technical challenge, but it also raises ethical and legal issues. As autonomous cars act based on the organization of sensory inputs, the organizing systems are necessarily developed relative to ethical considerations, whether intentional or not. At the most basic level, the organizing system will direct the autonomous car in making decisions analogous to those posited in the trolley problem, a famous thought experiment in ethics that forces a choice between saving five endangered people or taking the life of an innocent ...