PillarCon 2018

We humans have been driving for over one hundred years and making decisions on how to drive for just as long.  One of our greatest skills is the ability to determine, at a moments notice, of how to avoid situations that could injure ourselves or others.

In a world where vehicles are heading towards true autonomy they will be required to operate responsibly on the road.  They will need to replicate, or do better than our current human decision-making processes. These decisions will need to be more than a mechanical application of traffic laws and plotting a safe path.  They seem to require a sense of ethics, and this is a notoriously difficult capability to reduce into algorithms for a computer to follow.

We will explore why ethics matter for autonomous vehicles, how ethics will alter the process of programming these autonomous vehicles and broader ethical issues, including publicly owned vehicles, robot cars and hijacking.