IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018 - 63
T
he safety argument is perhaps the
most widely cited argument in fa-
vor of the rapid development and
widespread adoption of automated
vehicles (AVs). Versions of this ar-
gument promote the development
and use of AVs on the grounds that
these vehicles will have much lower crash, injury, or fa-
tality rates than human drivers. (Throughout this es-
say, I assume that AVs are designed to respond to
malfunctions and hazards without human intervention,
corresponding to level 4 or 5 automation [1].) For ex-
ample, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Admin-
istration's (NHTSA) Federal Automated Vehicles Policy,
announced in September 2016, gives the safety argu-
ment as its first, and most well-developed, argument
in support of AVs:
For [the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)],
the excitement around highly automated vehicles
(HAVs) starts with safety. Two numbers exemplify
the need. First, 35 092 people died on U.S. road-
ways in 2015 alone. Second, 94 percent of crash-
es can be tied to a human choice or error. An
important promise of HAVs is to address and
mitigate that overwhelming majority of crashes
[2, p. 5].
Safety is prominent throughout the document,
especially when compared to economic consider-
ations. In 116 pages, the framework uses the words
"safe" or its derivatives (e.g., "safety") 467 times; but
terms such as "unemployment" or "unemployed"
never occur. Potential economic concerns about AVs
are raised exactly once, in the introduction [2, p. 3]. In
short, while the framework momentarily nods in the
direction of economic and ethical concerns with AVs,
the substance of the framework gives no reason to
think that NHTSA will regulate this technology on any
basis other than safety.
Yet the economic impacts of AVs are likely to be
enormous. A recent Los Angeles Times story reports
that 3.4 million people in the U.S., or about 2% of the
U.S. labor force, are professional drivers - including
drivers of trucks, taxis, buses, and delivery vehicles
[3]. Automation will dramatically reduce the need for
these professional drivers, especially for long-distance
highway trucking. In October 2016, Otto (a subsidiary
of Uber) announced that they had delivered a ship-
ment of beer from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs
using an automated truck: "our professional driver
was out of the driver's seat for the entire 120-mile
journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system
from the sleeper berth in the back" [4]. Even if NHTSA
march 2018
∕
regulations required long-distance automated trucks
to have a human monitor, it is plausible that a monitor
would need much less training and experience than a
professional driver, and thus would likely receive
much lower pay.
In this respect, AVs are likely to be an important
test case for the next wave of automation. For obvious
reasons, it is basically impossible to produce high-level
projections of the economic impact of near-future
automation without relying on questionable assump-
tions. Thus estimates of these impacts vary dramati-
cally. Frey and Osborne [5] estimate that 47% of U.S.
jobs have "high probability of computerization," mean-
ing that they could be automated in the near future or
with relatively minor improvements in existing technol-
ogy. Arntz et al. [6] offer a relatively sanguine estimate
that "only 9% of all individuals in the U.S. face a high
automatibility, i.e., an automatibility of at least 70%"
[15]. However, even a 9% structural shift in employ-
ment is still massive; for comparison, the Great
Re cession of 2008-2010 caused a 6% increase in
unemployment in the U.S. Given that the political and
economic effects of automation are both highly uncer-
tain and likely to be large, analysis of the philosophical
issues raised by AVs can help us prepare for automa-
tion in other areas of the economy.
The philosophical issues raised by automation
include ethical issues, such as the intrinsic ethics of
AV systems (that is, the capacity of AVs to make moral
decisions) and the social ethics of technology adop-
tion (such as questions of justice as AVs replace
professional drivers). However, AVs also raise episte-
mological issues; that is, questions about our knowl-
edge and understanding of the se systems. And
political and epistemological issues can be entangled,
as stakeholders with different interests in AVs may be
motivated to make or critique different scientific or
technical claims. In other words, AVs have high politi-
cal and economic stakes, and these could lead to a
heated scientific controversy, somewhat like the con-
troversy over climate change. Philosophical analyses
of heated scientific controversies might help prevent
AVs - and automation more generally - from becom-
ing "the next climate change."
Proving the Safety of Self-Driving Cars
Kalra and Paddock [7] provide an a priori, statistical
analysis of the number of miles that AVs must travel in
order to produce precise estimates of the crash rate for
AVs based on observational data (that is, merely
recording the number of crashes as they happen). Car
crashes are relatively rare, even for human drivers -
Kalra and Paddock [7] report that "The 32 719 fatalities
[from car crashes] in 2013 correspond to a failure rate
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
63
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