We all know about the vehicle/content distinction (see Dennett 1991a, Millikan 1991, 1993). We shouldn't confuse properties represented in content with properties of vehicles of content. In particular, we shouldn't confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. The contents of the mental states of subject/agents are at the personal level. Vehicles of content are causally explanatory subpersonal events or processes or states. We shouldn't suppose that the properties of vehicles must be projected into what they represent for subject/agents, or vice (...) versa. This would be to confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. (shrink)

"A runaway trolley is speeding down a track" So begins what is perhaps the most fecund thought experiment of the past several decades since its invention by Philippa Foot. Since then, moral philosophers have applied the "trolley problem" as a thought experiment to study many different ethical conflicts - and chief among them is the programming of autonomous vehicles. Nowadays, however, very few philosophers accept that the trolley problem is a perfect analogy for driverless cars or that the situations autonomous (...) vehicles face will resemble the forced choice of the unlucky bystander in the original thought experiment. This book represents a substantial and purposeful effort to move the academic discussion beyond the trolley problem to the broader ethical, legal, and social implications that autonomous vehicles present. There are still urgent questions waiting to be addressed, for example: how AVs might interact with human drivers in mixed or "hybrid" traffic environments; how AVs might reshape our urban landscapes; what unique security or privacy concerns are raised by AVs as connected devices in the "Internet of Things"; how the benefits and burdens of this new technology, including mobility, traffic congestion, and pollution, will be distributed throughout society; and more. An attempt to map the landscape of these next-generation questions and to suggest preliminary answers, this volume draws on the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, economics, urban planning and transportation engineering, business ethics and more, and represents a global range of perspectives. (shrink)

The neural vehicles of mental representation play an explanatory role in cognitive psychology that their realizers do not. In this paper, I argue that the individuation of realizers as vehicles of representation restricts the sorts of explanations in which they can participate. I illustrate this with reference to Rupert’s (2011) claim that representational vehicles can play an explanatory role in psychology in virtue of their quantity or proportion. I propose that such quantity-based explanatory claims can apply only to realizers and (...) not to vehicles, in virtue of the particular causal role that vehicles play in psychological explanations. (shrink)

While autonomous vehicles (AVs) are not designed to harm people, harming people is an inevitable by-product of their operation. How are AVs to deal ethically with situations where harming people is inevitable? Rather than focus on the much-discussed question of what choices AVs should make, we can also ask the much less discussed question of who gets to decide what AVs should do in such cases. Here there are two key options: AVs with a personal ethics setting (PES) or an (...) “ethical knob” that end users can control or AVs with a mandatory ethics setting (MES) that end users cannot control. Which option, a PES or an MES, is best and why? This chapter argues, by drawing on the choice architecture literature, in favor of a hybrid view that requires mandated default choice settings while allowing for limited end user control. (shrink)

Despite numerous ethical examinations of automated vehicles, philosophers have neglected to address how these technologies will affect vulnerable people. To account for this lacuna, researchers must analyze how driverless cars could hinder or help social justice. In addition to thinking through these aspects, scholars must also pay attention to the extensive moral dimensions of automated vehicles, including how they will affect the public, nonhumans, future generations, and culturally significant artifacts. If planners and engineers undertake this task, then they will have (...) to prioritize their efforts to avoid additional harm. The author shows how employing an approach called a “complex moral assessment” can help professionals implement these technologies into existing mobility systems in a just and moral fashion. (shrink)

Traditional navigation visualization utilizes two-dimensional. maps for road guidance or arrow symbols for turn by turn information. While the advantage of map views is supposed to be the inherent understanding of the surroundings, often these schematic line-drawing bird's eye views are rather confusing than helpful because they cannot provide an overview and an appropriate level of detail in an area of interest at the same time, i.e. the user is forced to change between different resolutions. In this paper we describe (...) a 3D visualization system for vehicle navigation that overcomes these shortcomings by providing a realistic and perspective 3D view of the environment. (shrink)

In the near future, vehicles will gradually gain more autonomous functionalities. Drivers’ activity will be less about driving than about monitoring intelligent systems to which driving action will be delegated. Road safety, therefore, remains dependent on the human factor and we should identify the limits beyond which driver’s functional state (DFS) may no longer be able to ensure safety. Depending on the level of automation, estimating the DFS may have different targets, e.g. assessing driver’s situation awareness in lower levels of (...) automation and his ability to respond to emerging hazard or assessing driver’s ability to monitor the vehicle performing operational tasks in higher levels of automation. Unfitted DFS (e.g., drowsiness) may impact the driver ability respond to taking over abilities. This paper reviews the most appropriate psychophysiological indices in naturalistic driving while considering the DFS through exogenous sensors, providing the more efficient trade-off between reliability and intrusiveness. The DFS also originates from kinematic data of the vehicle, thus providing information that indirectly relates to drivers behaviour. The whole data should be synchronously processed, providing a diagnosis on the DFS, and bringing it to the attention of the decision maker in real time. Next, making the information available can be permanent or intermittent (or even undelivered), and may also depend on the automation level. Such interface can include recommendations for decision support or simply give neutral instruction. Mapping of relevant psychophysiological and behavioural indicators for DFS will enable practitioners and researchers provide reliable estimates, fitted to the level of automation. (shrink)

In the intelligent transportation system, the license information can be automatically recognized by the computer and the vehicle can be tracked. Red light running, illegal change of lanes, vehicle retrograde, and other illegal driving events are reasonably recorded. This is undoubtedly an effective help for the traffic police to relieve the huge work pressure. However, in China, a considerable number of vehicle tracking methods have certain limitations in resisting complex external environmental influences. The external environmental factors include (...) but not limited to variable factors such as camera movement, jitter, and severe rain and snow. These factors cannot be controlled well, so the tracking accuracy is greatly reduced. In regard to this, this paper proposes an optimization method for moving vehicle tracking based on SPF. First, according to the size of the overlapping area of the motion area between the two images, the researcher can construct and simplify the vertex adjacency matrix that reflects the characteristics of the undirected bipartite graph. Then according to the corresponding relationship between the vertex adjacency matrix and the regional behavior and vehicle behavior, the researcher completes the regional behavior analysis and vehicle behavior analysis. On this basis, a particle filter vehicle tracking algorithm based on segmentation compensation is introduced, and the vector sum of the tracked segmentation area is used as the final position of the target vehicle. In this way, as many scattered particles fall on the target area as possible, which will greatly improve the efficiency of particle utilization, enhance tracking accuracy, and avoid the problem of tracking failure caused by too fast vehicle movement. Through experimental simulation, it can be seen that the method proposed in this paper can greatly enhance the vehicle tracking ability when tracking vehicles in “complex environments.”. (shrink)

This semiotic research looks into the vehicle of the process of semiosis, the force or the medium by which the existence of a sign is recognized, and the process of semiosis is carried out. This force, which has been termed as ‘mind’ or ‘quasi-mind’ (Peirce 4.536 and 4.551), ‘organism’ (Johansen 1999), ‘codemaker’ or ‘agent’ (Barbieri 2007, 2008) and ‘interpreter’ (Emmeche et al. 2010) can be “any organism or a part of an organism, or just a product whose mechanism allows (...) or is able to carry out the process of semiosis”. These terms are used with reference to the existence of different types and domains of semiosis. In other words, it is not the process of semiosis, but the vehicle of the process of semiosis which makes the existence of different types and domains of semiosis. (shrink)

Self-driving vehicles will need to make decisions that carry ethical dimensions and manufacturers have (the responsibility) to pre-determine this underlying, deliberate decision-making process. With the rise of self-driving vehicles, scholars have simultaneously started investigating what ethical theories should guide machine behavior, but have not concluded as to which theory should be preferred and adopted. We aim to address this matter by providing a holistic and analytical review of the autonomous driving ethics literature. Based on this review, we summarize the social, (...) moral/legal, and functional advantages and disadvantages of applying particular (traditional) ethical theories to the decision-making of self-driving vehicles. Furthermore, we derive an integrated model that shows how each identified ethical theory could be technically implemented and guide the decision-making of self-driving vehicles. Overall, this article aims to set the groundwork for reflected, successful integration of ethical behavior within self-driving vehicles and deduce an updated research agenda. (shrink)

This paper is a new defense of the view that visual hallucinations lack content. The claim is that visual hallucinations are illusory not because their content is nonveridical, but rather because they seem to represent when they fail to represent anything in the first place. What accounts for the phenomenal character of visual experiences is not the content itself (content-representationalism), but rather the vehicle of content (vehicle-representationalism), that is, not the properties represented by visual experience, but rather the (...) relational properties of experience (or of the brain) of representing singular contents, namely particular instantiations of properties. I argue that the Russellian particular-involving proposition is the only appropriate model for the representational content of visual experience and hence that visual hallucinations are just like failed demonstrations. (shrink)

Autonomous vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives, but legal and social barriers may delay or even deter manufacturers from offering fully automated vehicles and thereby cost lives that otherwise could be saved. Moral philosophers use “thought experiments” to teach us about what ethics might say about the ethical behavior of AVs. If a manufacturer designing an AV decided to make what it believes is an ethical choice to save a large group of lives by steering (...) away from the large group towards a single individual, could the manufacturer be liable to that single individual? I believe the answer is yes. This article discusses famous “trolley problem” thought experiments in moral philosophy, which news articles have recently applied to AVs. After establishing a hypothetical case, applying product liability law to AV behavior may show a way, in some jurisdictions, that will permit a manufacturer to implement an ethical choice without triggering liability, but liability risk remains. I then turn to possible traditional defenses to see if they prevent liability for a manufacturer making what it believes is an ethical design choice—necessity, defense of self, and the sudden emergency doctrine. None of them provides an effective defense. Under current law, maximizing collision avoidance appears to minimize legal risk. I conclude that the only way to provide effective protection to a manufacturer seeking to implement ethical choices about AV behavior is through special legislation or regulation. (shrink)

The teleosemantic theory of representational content is held by some philosophers to imply that genes carry semantic information about whole-organism phenotypes. In this paper, I argue that this position is not supported by empirical findings. I focus on one of the most elaborate defenses of this position: Shea’s view that genes represent whole-organism phenotypes. I distinguish between two ways of individuating genes in contemporary biological science as possible vehicles of representational content—as molecular genes and as difference-maker genes. I show that (...) given either of these ways of individuating genes, genes fail to meet conditions which the teleosemantic theory requires an entity to meet if that entity is to qualify as a representational vehicle that represents a whole-organism phenotype. The considerations I present against Shea’s view generalize to other attempts to use the teleosemantic theory in support of the claim that genes represent whole-organism phenotypes. (shrink)

Two contrasting theories-actor-network theory and nondecision making-are separately applied to the same case study, namely, technologies for automatically identifying road vehicles. By this process, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are highlighted: The actor-network approach is useful for understanding local processes but lacks tools for easily illuminating patterns across countries; by contrast, the concept of nondecision making is useful for explaining the general lack of implementation of technology for automatic vehicle identification but not for explaining variations between developments (...) in different countries. This study highlights the importance of attempting to compare theories by using the same case study. (shrink)

Purpose Fully autonomous self-driving cars not only hold the potential for significant economic and environmental advantages but also introduce complex ethical dilemmas. One of the highly debated issues, known as the “trolley problems,” revolves around determining the appropriate actions for a self-driving car when faced with an unavoidable crash. Currently, the discourse on autonomous vehicle (AV) crash algorithms is primarily shaped by Western ethical traditions, resulting in a Eurocentric bias due to the dominant economic and political influence of the (...) West. However, considering that AV technology will be deployed across diverse cultural and religious contexts, this paper aims to contribute to the discourse by providing an Islamic perspective on programming the response of AVs in the event of an imminent crash. Design/methodology/approach This study proposes a novel methodology based on the Islamic concept of maṣlaḥa for the normative assessment of ethical decisions related to AV programming. Findings Drawing upon the works of classic Islamic jurists, this study highlights two distinct normative visions within Islamic traditions (akin to deontology and consequentialism) concerning the preservation of human lives in the context of AVs. This study explores the shared and divergent elements between Islamic and Western ethical approaches proposed for AVs. Originality/value This pioneering work examines AV crash algorithms from an Islamic perspective, filling a void in the global ethical discourse. This work will also serve an important role to bridge the gap between the theoretical Islamic ethical principles and their practical application in the realm of AVs. (shrink)

We address the considerations of the European Commission Expert Group on the ethics of connected and automated vehicles regarding data provision in the event of collisions. While human drivers’ appropriate post-collision behavior is clearly defined, regulations for automated driving do not provide for collision detection. We agree it is important to systematically incorporate citizens’ intuitions into the discourse on the ethics of automated vehicles. Therefore, we investigate whether people expect automated vehicles to behave like humans after an accident, even if (...) this behavior does not directly affect the consequences of the accident. We find that appropriate post-collision behavior substantially influences people’s evaluation of the underlying crash scenario. Moreover, people clearly think that automated vehicles can and should record the accident, stop at the site, and call the police. They are even willing to pay for technological features that enable post-collision behavior. Our study might begin a research program on post-collision behavior, enriching the empirically informed study of automated driving ethics that so far exclusively focuses on pre-collision behavior. (shrink)

Martínez-Manrique contends that we overlook a possible nonconnectionist vehicle theory of consciousness. We argue that the position he develops is better understood as a hybrid vehicle/process theory. We assess this theory and in doing so clarify the commitments of both vehicle and process theories of consciousness.

The notion of representation in neuroscience has largely been predicated on localizing the components of computational processes that explain cognitive function. On this view, which I call “algorithmic homuncularism,” individual, spatially and temporally distinct parts of the brain serve as vehicles for distinct contents, and the causal relationships between them implement the transformations specified by an algorithm. This view has a widespread influence in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, and has recently been ably articulated and defended by Shea. Still, I am (...) skeptical about algorithmic homuncularism, and I argue against it by focusing on recent methods for complex data analysis in systems neuroscience. I claim that analyses such as principle components analysis and linear discriminant analysis prevent individuating vehicles as algorithmic homuncularism recommends. Rather, each individual part contributes to a global state space, trajectories of which vary with important task parameters. I argue that, while homuncularism is false, this view still supports a kind of “vehicle realism,” and I apply this view to debates about the explanatory role of representation. (shrink)

The digital revolution, in the form of autonomous driving, is changing the very essence of mobility. This paper discusses four different ways in which these transformations are taking place and argues that public policies and business strategies need to focus on innovating and re-engineering (enveloping) whole environments. Only then will autonomous vehicles become an ordinary – and environmentally sustainable – reality. -/- .

The modern debate over the hellenistic doctrine of the fine-material soul-vehicle, including contributions by R. C. Kissling, E. R. Dodds, and J. Halfwassen, has seen an increasingly earlier date of origin being attributed to this doctrine. But the author who introduced the theory remains an unknown quantity. In this article I will argue that the author of this doctrine can be no other than Aristotle.

While traffic signals, signs, and road markings provide explicit guidelines for those operating in and around the roadways, some decisions, such as determinations of “who will go first,” are made by implicit negotiations between road users. In such situations, pedestrians are today often dependent on cues in drivers’ behavior such as eye contact, postures, and gestures. With the introduction of more automated functions and the transfer of control from the driver to the vehicle, pedestrians cannot rely on such non-verbal (...) cues anymore. To study how the interaction between pedestrians and automated vehicles (AVs) might look like in the future, and how this might be affected if AVs were to communicate their intent to pedestrians, we designed an external vehicle interface called automated vehicle interaction principle (AVIP) that communicates vehicles’ mode and intent to pedestrians. The interaction was explored in two experiments using a Wizard of Oz approach to simulate automated driving. The first experiment was carried out at a zebra crossing and involved nine pedestrians. While it focused mainly on assessing the usability of the interface, it also revealed initial indications related to pedestrians’ emotions and perceived safety when encountering an AV with/without the interface. The second experiment was carried out in a parking lot and involved 24 pedestrians, which enabled a more detailed assessment of pedestrians’ perceived safety when encountering an AV, both with and without the interface. For comparison purposes, these pedestrians also encountered a conventional vehicle. After a short training course, the interface was deemed easy for the pedestrians to interpret. The pedestrians stated that they felt significantly less safe when they encountered the AV without the interface, compared to the conventional vehicle and the AV with the interface. This suggests that the interface could contribute to a positive experience and improved perceived safety in pedestrian encounters with AVs – something that might be important for general acceptance of AVs. As such, this topic should be further investigated in future studies involving a larger sample and more dynamic conditions. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that in addition to the generally accepted aim of reducing traffic-related injuries and deaths as much as possible, a principle of fairness in the distribution of risk should inform our thinking about how firms that produce autonomous vehicles ought to program them to respond in conflict situations involving human-driven vehicles. This principle, I claim, rules out programming autonomous vehicles to systematically prioritize the interests of their occupants over those of the occupants of other vehicles, including (...) human-driven vehicles. Because there is reason to think that most consumers would prefer to purchase autonomous vehicles that do systematically prioritize the interests of occupants over those of others, if my argument is correct it generates a substantial ethical restriction on firms’ efforts to gain market share in the initial stages of the introduction of autonomous vehicles onto the road. (shrink)

Are automated vehicles really safer than manually driven vehicles? If so, how would we know? Answering this question has spurred a contentious debate. Unfortunately, several issues make answering this question difficult for the foreseeable future. First, how do we measure safety? Second, how can we keep track of automated vehicle safety? Finally, how do we determine what is or what is not an AV? Until these questions are addressed, it will continue to be difficult to determine whether or when (...) AVs might really be safer than manually driven vehicles. (shrink)

Building on Christopher Peacocke’s account of analog perceptual contentand my own account of analog perceptual vehicles, I defend three claims: that theperception of magnitudes often has analog contents; that the perception of magni-tudes often has analog vehicles; and that the first claim is true in virtue of the second—that is, the analog vehicles help to ground the analog contents.

This paper is a new defense of the view that visual hallucinations lack content. The claim is that visual hallucinations are illusory not because their content is nonveridical, but rather because they seem to represent when they fail to represent anything in the first place. What accounts for the phenomenal character of visual experiences is not the content itself, but rather the vehicle of content, that is, not the properties represented by visual experience, but rather the relational properties of (...) experience of representing singular contents, namely particular instantiations of properties. I argue that the Russellian particular-involving proposition is the only appropriate model for the representational content of visual experience and hence that visual hallucinations are just like failed demonstrations. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that if a set of plausible conditions obtain, then driving a standard vehicle rather than riding in an autonomous vehicle (AV) will become analogous to driving drunk rather than driving sober, and therefore impermissible. In addition, we argue that a ban on the production, sale, and purchase of new standard vehicles would also become justified. We make this case in part by highlighting that the central reasons typically offered in support of state-mandated vaccination (...) will also support mandating AV use. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of our argument for the obligations of vehicle-producing firms. (shrink)

This study focuses on analysing the ways in which vehicle stickers construct individual and group identities, people's religious faith and social vision in the context of religious assumptions and practices in Nigeria. Data comprise 73 vehicle stickers collected in Lagos and Ota, between 2006 and 2007 and are analysed within the framework of the post-structuralist model of discourse analysis which views discourse as a product of a complex system of social and institutional practices that sustain its continuous existence. (...) Results show that through stickers people define their individual and group identities within religious institutional practices. And as a means of group identification, they guarantee social security and privileges. In constructing social vision the stickers help mould the individual aspiration about a future which transcends the present. Significantly, stickers in the data also reveal the tension between Islam and Christianity and the struggle to propagate one above the other. (shrink)

Vehicle type recognition algorithms are broadly used in intelligent transportation, but the accuracy of the algorithms cannot meet the requirements of production application. For the high efficiency of the multilayer perceptive layer of Network in Network, the nonlinear features of local receptive field images can be extracted. Global average pooling can avoid the network from overfitting, and small convolution kernel can decrease the dimensionality of the feature map, as well as downregulate the number of model training parameters. On that (...) basis, the residual error is adopted to build a novel NIN model by altering the size and layout of the original convolution kernel of NIN. The feasibility of the algorithm is verified based on the Stanford Cars dataset. By properly setting weights and learning rates, the accuracy of the NIN model for vehicle type recognition reaches 97.2%. (shrink)

Drawing on various resources and requirements (as expressed by Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), this paper proposes an externalist view of conceptual mental episodes that does not equate them, even partially, with vehicles of any sort, whether the vehicles be located in the environment or in the head. The social and pragmatic nature of the use of concepts and conceptual content makes it unnecessary and indeed impossible to locate the entities that realize conceptual mental episodes in non-personal or subpersonal contentful (...) entities (vehicles). Persons, who engage in social practices of deontic scorekeeping (Brandom), and who are thus able to produce appropriate inferential behaviour, enact conceptual mental episodes and the basis of their supervenience. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on how automated vehicles can reduce the number of deaths and injuries in accident situations in order to protect public health. This is actually a problem not only of public health and ethics, but also of big data—not only in terms of all the different data that could be used to inform such decisions, but also in the sense of deciding how wide the scope of data should be. We identify three key different types of (...) data, including basic data, advanced data and preference data, provide an ethical analysis of the use of these different types of data and of different ways of prioritizing between pedestrians and passengers, and propose four rules that can help set ethical priorities for ethical data use and decision making by automated vehicles. (shrink)

This article argues that vehicles, roads and routes merit a much more central place in theorizations of migration politics. This argument is developed in terms of three theses. First, the study of migration politics should examine how vehicles feature in the public mediation of migration and border controversies. Second, it is important to analyze vehicles as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Third, an understanding of the materiality of transportation helps to explain how the vehicle (...) can sometimes become a site of strategic political action. These arguments are in turn used to develop a concept of viapolitics as a contribution to literatures on migration, mobilities and power. Viapolitics orients us to see migration from the middle, that is, from the angle of the vehicle and not just the state. It also seeks to connect migration studies to the history of problematizations, cultural types and the mythopoetics of the road. (shrink)

Unmanned (or Uninhabited) Aerial Vehicles are a key part of the American military's so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA) as practiced over Iraq. They are also part of the drive to shift agency away from humans and toward machines. This article considers the ways in which humans have, in calling on high technologies to distance them from what the military calls the “dull, the dirty, and the dangerous,” hoped to avoid responsibility for murder in wartime. In examining the claims of (...) weapons manufacturers and their military customers, the article focuses on the concept of “systems of systems” and the various outcomes such battlespace imaginings might have for human beings. The article concludes that the RMA entertains a fantasy of human agency while technological systems call out to and conjure up other technological systems that are possessed not only of their own logics but also purposes that are hidden and disturbing. (shrink)

O'Brien & Opie's theory fails to address the issue of consciousness and introspection. They take for granted that once something is experienced, it can be commented on. But introspection requires neural structures that, according to their theory, have nothing to do with experience as such. That makes the tight coupling between the two in humans a mystery.

The convergence of computing, sensing, and communication technology will soon permit large-scale deployment of self-driving vehicles. This will in turn permit a radical transformation of traffic control technology. This paper makes a case for the importance of addressing questions of social justice in this transformation, and sketches a preliminary framework for doing so. We explain how new forms of traffic control technology have potential implications for several dimensions of social justice, including safety, sustainability, privacy, efficiency, and equal access. Our central (...) focus is on efficiency and equal access as desiderata for traffic control design. We explain the limitations of conventional traffic control in meeting these desiderata, and sketch a preliminary vision for a next-generation traffic control tailored to address better the demands of social justice. One component of this vision is cooperative, hierarchically distributed self-organization among vehicles. Another component of this vision is a priority system enabling selection of priority levels by the user for each vehicle trip in the network, based on the supporting structure of non-monetary credits. (shrink)

Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering genuine explanations (...) by correctly capturing relevant patterns of counterfactual dependence and licensing correct inferences. Using the example of Newtonian force explanations of the tides, I show how, even in science, fiction can be a vehicle for truth. (shrink)

We think the best prospect for a naturalistic explanation of phenomenal consciousness is to be found at the confluence of two influential ideas about the mind. The first is the _computational _ _theory of mind_: the theory that treats human cognitive processes as disciplined operations over neurally realised representing vehicles.1 The second is the _representationalist theory of _ _consciousness_: the theory that takes the phenomenal character of conscious experiences (the “what-it-is-likeness”) to be constituted by their representational content.2 Together these two (...) theories suggest that phenomenal consciousness might be explicable in terms of the representational content of the neurally realised representing vehicles that are generated and manipulated in the course of cognition. The simplest and most elegant hypothesis that one might entertain in this regard is that conscious experiences are identical to (i.e., are one and the same as) the brain’s representing vehicles. (shrink)

As vehicles become more autonomous, the task of designing guiding systems that make morally acceptable decisions is getting more urgent. It is sometimes assumed that one solution will be acceptable across various cultures. In this paper we argue for the importance of intercultural perspectives; in particular, we explore possible insights derived from Buddhist philosophy, taking avail of the virtue of compassion (karuṇā). We suggest that autonomous vehicles should first learn in supervised situations so that they reach a level of decision-making (...) ability that human experts within a given culture deem morally good. How will they be evaluated? In some debates it is assumed that there is a one-fit-all answer to be found based on an agreed-upon moral theory. Apart from problems of ethical pluralism within a given culture, there are also problems due to different moral preferences and driving styles across cultures. One way the problem might be addressed is to introduce a machine-learning training curriculum that would provide autonomous vehicles with a process comparable to a novice human driver learning to drive and passing her own driving license test. (shrink)

Wilderness Search and Rescue is the process of finding and assisting persons who are lost in remote wilderness areas. Because such areas are often rugged or relatively inaccessible, searching for missing persons can take huge amounts of time and resources. Camera-equipped mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have the potential for speeding up the search process by enabling searchers to view aerial video of an area of interest while closely coordinating with nearby ground searchers. In this paper, we report on lessons learned by (...) trying to use UAVs to support WiSAR. Our research methodology has relied heavily on field trials involving searches conducted under the direction of practicing search and rescue personnel but using simulated missing persons. Lessons from these field trials include the immediate importance of seeing things well in the video, the field need for defining and supporting various roles in the search team, role-specific needs like supporting systematic search by providing a visualization tool to represent the quality of the search, and the on-going need to better support interactions between ground and video searchers. Surprisingly to us, sophisticated autonomous search patterns were less critical than we anticipated, though advances in video enhancement and visualizing search progress, as well as ongoing work to model the likely location of a missing person, open up the possibility of closing the loop between UAV path-planning, search quality, and the likely location of a moving missing person. Keywords: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Wilderness Search and Rescue, Human–Robot Interaction, Human Factors, Field Robotics, Graphical User Interfaces. (shrink)

Compared to human-operated vehicles, autonomous vehicles offer numerous potential benefits. However, public acceptance of AVs remains low. Using 4 studies, including 1 preregistered experiment, the present research examines the role of trust in AV adoption decisions. Using the Trust-Confidence-Cooperation model as a conceptual framework, we evaluate whether perceived integrity of technology—a previously underexplored dimension of trust that refers to perceptions of the moral agency of a given technology—influences AV policy support and adoption intent. We find that perceived technology integrity predicts (...) adoption intent for AVs and that messages that increase perceived integrity of AV technology result in greater AV adoption intent and policy support. This knowledge can be used to guide communication efforts aimed at increasing public trust in AVs, and ultimately enhance integration of AVs into transport systems. (shrink)

How should autonomous vehicles be programmed to behave in the event of an unavoidable accident in which the only choice open is one between causing different damages or losses to different objects or persons? This paper addresses this ethical question starting from the normative principles elaborated in the law to regulate difficult choices in other emergency scenarios. In particular, the paper offers a rational reconstruction of some major principles and norms embedded in the Anglo-American jurisprudence and case law on the (...) “doctrine of necessity”; and assesses which, if any, of these principles and norms can be utilized to find reasonable guidelines for solving the ethical issue of the regulation of the programming of autonomous vehicles in emergency situations. The paper covers the following topics: the distinction between “justification” and “excuse”, the legal prohibition of intentional killing outside self-defence, the incommensurability of goods, and the legal constrains to the use of lethal force set by normative positions: obligations, responsibility, rights, and authority. For each of these principles and constrains the possible application to the programming of autonomous vehicles is discussed. Based on the analysis, some practical suggestions are offered. (shrink)