DRIVING in San Francisco is like watching a robot uprising in the making. Last week, I was crossing an intersection, turning from one major downtown thoroughfare onto another, and realized that my vehicle was surrounded by four experimental self-driving cars.
They weren’t exactly difficult to spot, their bumpers encrusted with radar and other sensors, their roofs topped by enormous Lidar rigs, including bulbous, whirling cameras shaped like turrets.
These kinds of cars aren’t uncommon in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the south of the city. But their numbers are growing fast, bringing many questions with them.ON THE night of 3 September 2010, 33-year-old Brian Wood was driving along a highway in Washington state. Asleep in the passenger seat was his wife Erin, seven months pregnant with their first child. The couple were on their way from Vancouver, Canada, to spend time at her parents’ vacation home by the picturesque Puget Sound.
Out of nowhere, a Chevy Blazer came hurtling towards them. By the time Wood saw it, it was too late. He braked hard and swerved right to take the brunt of the impact. He died instantly, but his wife and their unborn daughter survived.
We hope it never happens to us, but any driver might find themselves making such a split-second, life-and-death decision. They are part rational, part reflex, and draw on a delicate balance of altruism and self-interest programmed into all of us. To his wife, Wood was a hero – but indisputably he was a human.
As our cars edge towards making these decisions for us, cases like this raise profound ethical questions. To drive safely in a human world, autonomous vehicles must learn to think like us – or at least understand how humans think. But how will they learn, and which humans should they try to emulate? “We’re talking about self-driving cars, up to two tonnes of steel and machine that could crash into homes and people,” says ethicist Patrick Lin of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. “We definitely can’t leave it up to manufacturers to do what they want.” It’s time to engage low gear – we have a moral mountain to climb.Erin Wood recalls her husband Brian as a selfless man who was counting the days until the couple welcomed the birth of their first child. And while she is filled with grief, she is equally filled with gratitude to him for sacrificing his life to save two others — hers and that of their unborn baby.
The Vancouver, B.C., couple were traveling through Washington state to visit family Friday when an oncoming Chevy Blazer weaved wildly. As the car hurtled at them head-on, Brian braked hard and swerved to the right, ensuring he would take the brunt of the crash as the Blazer slammed into them.
“It’s pretty obvious if you look at the car that if it would have been a head-on crash, we both would have been killed, right along with our baby,” Erin Wood told Carl Quintanilla on TODAY Monday from Vancouver.
“He definitely saved us. He made that choice, and I’m thankful for that.”
It was a life cut short for Brian, 33, lead designer for Relic Entertainment, renowned in the computer gaming world for such games as “Company of Heroes.” He would have been celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary with Erin on Friday; instead, she and family are planning his funeral for Sunday.
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