IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 74

Following De George, customers are entitled to know
about vehicle safety; this requires extraordinary transparency regarding self-driving cars due to technical
complexities and inevitable tradeoffs occasioned by this
new technology. Given that a broad and diverse base of
users, with vastly different levels of education, may
come to rely on the technology, legalistic and obtuse
user agreements are unlikely to suffice.

How transparent will companies
be about how the self-driving car
is designed to behave, especially
in dynamic or dangerous traffic
situations?
In addition, we would argue that the makers of automated cars should be held accountable for their designs.
Before any deployment, each company should demonstrate through carefully monitored trials on test driving
tracks that the introduction of its system will not degrade
road safety. This testing should take into account the
issues raised above, including the interactions between
competing brands of cars and with human drivers. While
we anticipate that this requirement will add time to any
eventual adoption of self-driving cars, we contend that
this measure is appropriate considering the importance
of protecting the public.
Requiring a demonstration of public safety before a
product is released is not unprecedented. In fact, such
demonstrations are routinely required of, for example,
drug companies. We expect that automated cars may
have more of an impact on public safety than any individual new drug or medical device. Therefore, detailed safety trials before deployment seems not only prudent but
should be a minimum requirement. Unlike De George,
we argue that responsibility for such safety trials should
not rest primarily with managers and regulators; rather,
for the reasons stated in this paper, we believe this
shared responsibility should also be reflected in the ethical and professional behavior of engineering designers of
self-driving cars, even in the face of external pressure
from management or other entities. The fact that such
requirements have not heretofore been enforced, since
cars with significant levels of automation are already on
public roads, suggests that in the case of automated
cars, economic forces and technological momentum
have superseded the public good; this inversion of values
should be halted and reversed.

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IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

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june 2017

http://www http://www.autonews.com/article/20151006154644/OEM02/151009883 http://spectrum.ieee.org/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the http://ieeex http://plore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=5779006 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-agenda/ http://www.Forbes.com http://www.forbes http://www.reuters.com/ http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/ http://www.asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road http://www.huff http://www.CNN.com http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/12/autos/google https://www.enotrans.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ http://http:// http://www.nytimes

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017