Your Driverless Car Hit A Pedestrian To Save Your Life By John Markoff Analysis

Cars Cannot Think Like Humans
Problems arise when new things come up, therefore, there are many problems people should face, especially on ethics. In the article “Should Your Driverless Car Hit a Pedestrian to Save Your Life”, the author, John Markoff provides many issues on autonomous cars for readers to consider, and the core of these issues is the ethical problem. If self-driving cars are designed to do best for the common good and protect people from unexpected accidents, how autonomous cars make appropriate moral decisions is hard for people to solve. A car cannot be an independent thinking machine, and it is hard for a car to make right moral decisions. There are two main reasons why a car cannot think like human beings and decide difficult

Though cars look looks like independent thinking machines, actually, they rely on people’s wisdom. In John Markoff’ s article, the author writes “They are not outlawed, but they must be designed to allow ‘appropriate levels’ of human judgement over their use”(Markoff, 2). The word “they” in this sentence refers to semiautonomous and completely autonomous weapons, which are made and ruled by people. Using weapons to protect one country or threaten people’s lives is depends on rule makers’ thoughts, therefore, driverless cars are similar to autonomous weapons, for the reason that people who should be protected first are decided by people. Although it seems that autonomous cars are smarter and smarter, the fact is that this kind of cars rely on human’s technology and intelligence, so without human, driverless cars are just common cars. Now that cars cannot have their own thoughts, some people come up with an idea that people can give driverless cars moral guidance, however, this idea arises another question:who can make sure that people can answer to all the moral

People design smart systems for driverless cars to provide safe and convenient service for drivers, nevertheless when cars should choose whom to protect in an unavoidable accident, different people have different thoughts. Markoff in his articles writes “......to spare others, the researchers, not surprisingly, found that people would rather stay alive”(Markoff, 1). This quote is about a quiz consequence which shows that people would rather stay alive in a complex situation than save others. Accordingly to this result, if manufacturers want to sell their smart cars well, they may choose to design a system which can protect passengers first, and apparently, it seems dangerous to the pedestrians, even the public safety. Markoff also provides another person’s view in his article: “Before we can put our values into machines, we have to figure out how to make our values clear and consistent”(Markoff, 3). If the value put into the self-driving cars just cares about manufacturers and their consumers, the autonomous cars will not be accepted by the society. On the contrary, if the value is decided by people like pedestrians, the smart cars may lose their consumers. When people cannot have unified answers on moral problems, it is not appropriate to put people’s value into self-driving cars. Even though one day want to have a try on giving cars the moral guidance, who can be the leader