Safety Ethics for Design and Test of Automated Driving Features

The promise of automated vehicle technology is to eventually improve safety by eliminating human error from driving in the long term, and helping drivers avoid collisions in the near term. However, a long road remains to achieving the goal of a scalable fleet of completely autonomous vehicles. Meanwhile, in the rush to develop the technology, significant ethical considerations are being left by the wayside. At first blush, it might seem that ethical issues largely involve setting public policies as to how safe might be safe enough to deploy, and deciding what constraints (if any) to place on machine behavior that might inappropriately favor occupants vs. pedestrians in impending crash situations. However, other concrete ethical issues are playing out that directly concern design, test, and lifecycle support practices. Without direct engineering support, significant ethical issues regarding safety will go unaddressed. We use three examples to illustrate how the principles in the IEEE 7000 standard for ethical design practices apply to designers and tool vendors working on autonomous vehicles