Cybertech: Self-Driving Car

Even though autonomous cars can lead to cost-saving, they still encounter much skepticism. One of the resistance stems from the lack of education of society around the technology. Gartner research found that fifty-five percent of people interviewed in Germany and the United States claimed they would not even give a thought to riding in a car that is fully autonomous.

However, seventy-five percent said that they would give a thought to riding in a car that is partially autonomous. The biggest concerns in these people are around technology failure and security.

It is claimed,however, that with time, the issue of low societal acceptance will be addressed. The cars will make their way slowly from early adopters to other sectors of society. It is because over time, the cars will evolve from level two to level three then to level four and five of autonomy as people slowly come to accept them as a reality without any awe or shock.

Analysis Cybertechnology employed in autonomous cars is hindered by moral issues around the liability of the autonomous cars, the safetyof the cars, societal acceptance of the cars and poorly understood technology.

To resolve these moral issues involving cybertechnology, the first thing to do is that of disclosing the moral values ingrained in the computer systems design.

This call is for computer scientists who understand cybertechnology much better than social scientists and philosophers do. The input of social scientists is also required so that they can not only evaluate computer system design but also make the computer design more user-friendly.

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The input of philosophers is that of determining whether existing ethical theories are enough to test the moral issues that are newly disclosed.

Using sociological perspective, it was explained that the cybertechnology in the autonomous cars involves practices that have moral implications. These moral implications can be resolvedby disclosing the moral values ingrained in the car’s computer system design. This call is for the input of computer scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. The input of these people in the manufacturing of the cars will be needed to align the programming of the car in line with acceptable ethics, which are act utilitarianism and Kantianism. At the core of act utilitarianism framework is that the autonomous car should be for the good of the many. The masses and not the individual is the reference in act utilitarianism.

The individual being at the core of Kantian framework implies that a moral system or an internalized code of behavior is used to judge an action. Kantians will argue that an action will be performed if everyone will rationally act as proposed. Kantians will also argue that the action needs to respect the goals of people rather than use them for one’s selfish purposes.

Morality of Cybertechnology According to Dr. Philip Brey, professor of philosophy of technology at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, the mainstream or standard applied ethics methodology when it comes to “disclosive” method for ethics is not always enough to be used to identify moral issues that involve cybertechnology. Dr. Brey worries that if the standard model is used, people may fail to see certain or features embedded in the cybertechnology design. These practices are said to be morally opaque or to have morally nontransparent features. These features are contrasting with morally transparent features. Morally controversial features, which are transparent, tend to be morally problematic. However, what is moredifficult to discern is the morally opaque features in technology.

It is for many reasons that the features in cybertechnology become morally opaque. One of the reasons is that the features are unknown. The other reason is that they could be known but seen to be morally neutral. Computerized practices that involve programming will be unknown to the people who are not familiar with the idea of computer programming and who have not heard of this concept.

However, this cybertechnology needs not to be assumed to be ethically or morally neutral just because computer programming techniques are not known to nontechnical people as well as ethicists. Even if such computer techniques are morally opaque to users, computerizing self-driven cars raise many moral issues to do with safety.

One of the features of autonomous cars is that it is driven by computer programs that can be morally controversial because of not being transparent or obvious to many people including those who own the car or those who manufacture the car. Therefore, while such technology as the self-driving car might appear to be morally neutral, a closer look at the practices that involve this cybertechnology will expose moral implications of the technology.