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Researchers Teach Human Ethics to Autonomous Cars

To actually integrate autonomous vehicles into everyday life, researchers need to teach the cars how to make the safe driving decisions that come intuitively to human drivers. Stanford University engineers are conducting experiments to translate social behavior into algorithms so that self-driving cars will maintain vehicle safety and passenger comfort.

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 Stanford University. Right now, the technology for automated vehicles is moving really fast. But to actually integrate them into society, there are a lot of considerations that humans do subconsciously, intuitively. We have to program vehicles to make these same kinds of decisions in the same kinds of scenarios,

    00:00:28 and it's really important to do so in an ethical, morally responsible way. Programmers are going to, ahead of time, decide how these autonomous vehicles maneuver. And human drivers often will violate traffic laws in order to maintain vehicle safety and occupant comfort. If you are programming an autonomous vehicle and you encounter an obstacle in the middle of your lane, what do you do? Because a human driver would go around the obstacle and violate

    00:00:58 the double yellow line, assuming that it's clear. But do we program the autonomous vehicle to actually ahead of time decide to break the law? We can treat that as a very harsh, strict constraint, and the vehicle will have to come to a complete stop in order to not hit the obstacle. Another option would be to minimize how much it violates the double yellow line and veer very closely to the obstacle, very uncomfortable for the occupants in the passenger seat.

    00:01:26 The third scenario is to enter the oncoming traffic lane to give more space to the obstacle as you maneuver around it. The car itself is moving based on algorithms. And these algorithms that we use have different constraints as well as costs. And we tune them to tell it how far away to be from an obstacle, how close to get to an obstacle. The car itself doesn't care. In a way, we can translate human comfort, human safety

    00:01:54 into these numerical constraints and costs. The vehicles are going to be what's making the decisions now, and so we need to somehow translate social behavior, ethical behavior into what happens once the vehicle finally takes full control. For more, please visit us at stanford.edu.