UMass Lowell professor steers ethical debate on self-driving cars

Those are the kinds of questions that preoccupy

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Nicholas Evans, a UMass Lowell assistant professor of philosophy who teaches engineering ethics and studies the ethical dilemmas posed by emerging technologies, including drones and self-driving vehicles.

"You could program a car to minimize the number of deaths or life-years lost in any situation, but then something counterintuitive happens: When there's a choice between a two-person car and you alone in your self-driving car, the result would be to run you off the road," Evans said. "People are much less likely to buy self-driving vehicles if they think theirs might kill them on purpose and be programmed to do so."

Now Evans has won a three-year, $556,650 National Science Foundation grant to construct ethical answers to questions about autonomous vehicles, translate them into decision-making algorithms for the vehicles and then test the public health effects of those algorithms under different risk scenarios using computer modeling.

He will be working with two fellow UMass Lowell faculty members, Heidi Furey, a lecturer in the Philosophy Department, and Yuanchang Xie, an assistant professor of civil engineering who specializes in transportation engineering. The research team also includes Ryan Jenkins, an assistant professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, and experts in public health modeling at Gryphon Scientific.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-umass-lowell-professor-ethical-debate.html#jCp