Ego Morality
Today's topic is how 'morality' will be programmed into autonomous vehicles. There has been some recurring press on this issue over the last month and I've had some time to formulate my thoughts on this topic. It is tough as, like most of first-world humanity, I think I'm moral but I've never faced the really tough life-and-death moral decisions that put that assertion to the test. Most of my morality training has come from Star Trek, and that's not bad, but it is fairly basic and presumes that I'm sitting on the bridge of a star ship in orbit, debating the gray areas of the Prime Directive. I hope I never have to even that. Should it happen though, I'm pretty sure that if I have the time to think through the decision, I'll do the right thing.
But, that's the catch: 'if I have the time to think it through'. The area where this is most likely to happen in my current life path is when I drive. It is easily the most dangerous thing that I do on a daily/weekly/monthly basis (I ski and take some bigger risks there, but am only able to get in about twelve days a year). Driving is a task that, when it goes south, will happen too quickly for my frontal lobe to override my learned motor skills and lizard brain reflexes. Reflexes that have been fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years to keep the individual alive.
