In a report, 'Ethics of Automated Vehicles: Breaking Traffic Rules for Road Safety', the group warns that strictly forbidding AVs from breaking existing traffic rules may hamper road safety.
“While they promise to minimise road safety risk, AVs like hybrid AI systems can still create collision risk due to technological and human-system interaction issues, the complexity of traffic, interaction with other road users and vulnerable road users,” said UK transport consultant professor Nick Reed, from Reed Mobility.
“Ethical goal functions for AVs would enable developers to optimise driving behaviours for safety under conditions of uncertainty while allowing for differentiation of products according to brand values.”
The European Commission recently suggested that AVs may have to break strict traffic rules to minimise safety risks and to operate with appropriate transparency.
But the report finds there is a lot of nuance to this depending on the vehicle...