The role of utilitarianism, self-safety, and technology in the acceptance of self-driving cars
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The role of utilitarianism, self‑safety, and technology in the acceptance of self‑driving cars Stamatis Karnouskos1 Received: 8 April 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Self-driving vehicles are currently being developed in major industries for mass public deployment. Their benefits are attractive, and there is interest in having them on the streets as quickly as possible. Delegating responsibility to the cars has farreaching impacts. As accidents will be unavoidable, the self-driving car will be asked to make life and death decisions that will impact human lives. However, the impact of machine decision making on the overall acceptance of self-driving cars in society is far from sufficiently addressed. The research presented here investigates three factors, i.e., technology, self-safety, and utilitarianism, and hypothesizes their link to self-driving car acceptance. Survey-collected data is statistically analyzed to assess the proposed hypotheses. The empirical outcome of this work shows that the three investigated factors contribute to the societal acceptance of self-driving cars, with technology being the major contributor while the ethical aspects (selfsafety and utilitarianism) follow. Keywords Self-driving car · Intelligent vehicles · Ethics · Safety · Autonomous systems
1 Introduction Advanced and autonomous vehicles are increasingly becoming a reality worldwide (Fernandez-Rojas et al. 2019); however, we are not ready for their mass introduction (Shladover and Nowakowski 2019; Mordue et al. 2020). This delegation of responsibilities to sophisticated machines enables us to undertake complex actions, with little human effort, as the underlying complexity is hidden by the machines, e.g., in driver-assistance features of modern cars. Several areas utilize such intelligent machines that make mission-critical decisions autonomously, and although most of them were up to recently in industrial settings, nowadays they increasingly penetrate areas that directly affect the general population. One key domain that is intensively experimenting with intelligent machines is the automotive sector, where traditional manufacturers and technology companies experiment with various levels of autonomy, e.g., Tesla (cars, trucks), Uber (cars), and Waymo (taxi service).
* Stamatis Karnouskos [email protected] 1
SAP, Walldorf, Germany
Modern cars already provide significant automated features to their drivers, e.g., cruise control, parking, road deviation alarms, object detection, crash avoidance. However, while the awareness of the car itself and the warnings it can propagate to its driver increase due to the utilization of more sophisticated technology, we have to be pragmatic and reconcile with the view that not all of the accidents will be possible to be avoided. On the one hand, self-driving cars, for a variety of reasons, have already been involved in fatal accidents either of the driver or pedestrians (NTSB 2019a, b). On the other
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