Designing Ethical Guidelines for Self-driving Cars

As an envisaged future of transportation, self-driving cars are being discussed from various perspectives, including social, economical, engineering, computer science, design, and ethics. On the one hand, self-driving cars present new engineering problems that are being gradually successfully solved. On the other hand, social and ethical problems are typically being presented in the form of an idealized unsolvable decision-making problem, the so-called “ Trolley problem", which is grossly misleading. Such ethical dilemmas obfuscate currently much bigger ethical challenges in the development and operation of self-driving cars. 

A systematic approach to ethical challenges taking into consideration components, systems and stakeholders in the process of development  and deployment of autonomous cars helps to address and solve actual real-life ethical challenges and to move away from dead ends of hypothetical thought experiments. Since self-driving cars are an inter-disciplinary topic, the perspective of user experience/interaction design, i.e. disciplines that follow user-centred design processes, can contribute to a fruitful discussion about ethical guidelines.

In this seminar identified ethical challenges will be presented and ethical guidelines and recommendations for the development of self-driving cars introduced and discussed.

Tobias Holstein is an associate researcher at the School of Innovation, Design and Engineering at Mälardalen University in Västeras (Sweden) and a research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt (Germany).  Tobias studied computer science and received two M.Sc. degrees in 2009 (Edinburgh Napier University) and 2010 (University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt). During the following five years he gained professional experience as software developer and software architect developing prototypes in the automotive industry. In 2013 he joined the In-Car-Multimedia Laboratory at the h_da to research human-computer interaction and software architecture in context of Multi-OS environments for automotive purposes. In 2016 he received the licentiate degree from Mälardalen University.  His research interests are within ethics, interaction design and software architecture and transdisciplinary research approaches to improve software architectures by interaction design and vice versa.   Welcome!   - Sara and Gordana   

For questions about the seminar, please contact Gordana: gordana.dodig-crnkovic@chalmers.se