The Tunnel Problem: You are travelling along a single lane mountain road in an autonomous car that is approaching a narrow tunnel. You are the only passenger of the car. Just before entering the tunnel a child attempts to run across the road but trips in the center of the lane, effectively blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The car has only two options: continue straight, thereby hitting and killing the child, or swerve, thereby colliding into the wall on either side of the tunnel and killing you.

If you find yourself as the passenger of the tunnel problem described above, how should the car react?

 

How hard was it for you to answer the Tunnel Problem question?

 

Who should determine how the car responds?

 

Should we be surprised by these results? Not really. The tunnel problem poses a deeply moral question, one that has no right answer. In such cases an individual’s deep moral commitments could make the difference between going straight or swerving.

According to philosophers like Bernard Williams, our moral commitments should sometimes trump other ethical considerations even if that leads to counterintuitive outcomes, like sacrificing the many to save the few. In the tunnel problem, arbitrarily denying individuals their moral preferences, by hard-coding a decision into the car, runs the risk of alienating them from their convictions. That is definitely not fantastic.

In healthcare, when moral choices must be made it is standard practice for nurses and physicians to inform patients of their reasonable treatment options, and let patients make informed decisions that align with personal preferences. This process of informed consent is based on the idea that individuals have the right to make decisions about their own bodies. Informed consent is ethically and legally entrenched in healthcare, such that failing to obtain informed consent exposes a healthcare professional to claims of professional negligence.

Informed consent wasn’t always the standard of practice in healthcare. It used to be common for physicians to make important treatment decisions on behalf of patients, often actively deceiving them as part of a treatment plan.

 

 

Ref: If death by autonomous car is unavoidable, who should die? Reader poll results – RoboHub
Ref: You Should Have a Say in Your Robot Car’s Code of Ethics – Wired