IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2017 - 110

Autonomous vehicles will not be programmed to allow the type of lane crossing shown by
this gray minivan. Drivers currently take agency to bend the rules of the road based on
their own beliefs, ethics, and cultural ways. Sometimes these behaviors can lead to accidents. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bart Everson.)

vehicle, whether or not I can set the ethics to my own values
if they are still within the law or if I must use the ethics programmed into the software on the car should be debated. This
would extend for new and used car purchases as well.
To some extent, we forfeit ethical considerations when we
ride with other drivers or in other vehicles at the moment of
travel. We don't ask the train, bus, taxi, or ride-sharing operators and drivers what their ethics are before we climb aboard.
But will this matter when we own or ride in autonomous
vehicles that we can't evaluate or review and with which we
share no common culture or history?
If ethics could be customizable in autonomous vehicles,
the road space could become more or less fragmented
depending upon who is driving-and where. The potential
outcomes, opportunities, risk, and oversight needed would
also need to be evaluated.
The technology industry's role in manufacturing autonomous vehicles is different than its usual product production.
When electronics and computer companies manufacture their
products, they often rely on software in the form of operating
systems to provide the user selection for globalization and local
regional language options. For autonomous vehicles, these may
also be set as software options, along with some way to
account for local laws and traffic rules. This leaves the driver
and operator ethics unaccounted for in autonomous vehicles.
Up until the present, the ethics for vehicles were embedded in
humans and the rules of the road, not in software and not in the
vehicle. This will change with autonomous vehicles, and as
such, the opportunity for people to embed their own ethics in
their own autonomous vehicles (or any other form of automated algorithmic assistance) may not be considered or may be
considered and discarded.
As long as cultures consider ethics in the fashioning of
their laws, and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles
110 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

JULY 2017

consider these as they develop vehicles
for a global market, there will be some
protection for people as long as they
agree on the ethics of how their particular locale resolves the trolley problem
for them. Presently, we are able to disagree with the locale's ethics to suit
our own needs because we are driving and can make our own ethical
choices by taking agency when we
need to. We will forfeit that option
when we are being driven and when
we purchase or rent autonomous
vehicles in their current designed
state. However, if we make an effort
to understand cultural requirements
and ethical considerations in this context, we can include these in the
ethics debate, combined with improved
regulation, for the future programming
of autonomous vehicles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sally Applin (saa26@kent.ac.uk) earned her B.A. degree in
conceptual design from San Francisco State University, her
master's degree from the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and her Ph.D.
degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury, United
Kingdom, working with the Centre for Social Anthropology
and Computing, where she researched the changing relationship between humans and algorithms, the impact of technology on culture, maker culture, leading-edge technologies, and
the outcomes of network complexities as modeled by PolySocial Reality. She is an associate editor of IEEE Consumer
Electronics Magazine (Impacts section), a member of the
Internet of Things (IoT) Council (a think tank for the IoT),
and a board member of the Edward H. and Rosamond B.
Spicer Foundation.

REfEREncEs
[1] J. J. Thomson, "The trolley problem," Yale Law J., vol. 94, no. 6, pp.
1395-1396, May 1985.
[2] M. Hauser, F. Cushman, L. Young, R. Kang-Xing Jin, and J. Mikhail,
"A dissociation between moral judgments and justifications," Mind
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[3] N. Gold, A. Colman, and B. Pulford, "Cultural differences in
responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems," Judgment Decision Making, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 65-76, Jan. 2014.
[4] F. Lambert. (2016, Dec. 28). How Tesla's autopilot is able to steer in
the snow even without lane markings or lead vehicle. Electrek. [Online].
Available: https://electrek.co/2016/12/28/tesla-autopilot-snow/
[5] A. Webb. (2017, Mar. 13). The salt lines for tonight's storm is confusing the Tesla's autopilot. Twitter. [Online]. Available: https://twitter.com/
amywebb/status/841292068488118273
[6] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "New technologies and mixed-use convergence: How humans and algorithms are adapting to each other," in
Proc. 2015 IEEE Int. Symp. Technology Society, Dublin, Ireland, 2015,
pp. 4-7.

https://www.electrek.co/2016/12/28/tesla-autopilot-snow/ https://www.twitter.com/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2017