Argumentative Essay On Self-Driving Technology

In the world, there is a huge development of technology’s possibility to work without or instead of people. In factories, there are many machines working replaced with people. In public spaces, such as shopping malls, stations, and hotels, there are robots helping people to tell correct direction of where they want to go. Even at an airport, we can check-in with machine, not in person.

Recently, the idea of self-driving vehicles have been increasing. I have heard positive aspects of the development of self-driving vehicles, for example, a car driven by technology can have less numbers of traffic violation and accident and also, traffic jams can be controlled.

From a consequentialist perspective, self-driving vehicles can be an ethical technology.

A self-driving car can be programed how to control the car when an accident happens. A well-known example of accident is that a self-driving car should choose to sacrifice either pedestrians or passengers when the car loose the control of the brake and there are many people crossing the street in the front of the car. If the car is programed to avoid attacking pedestrians rather than protecting passengers, maybe more number of people can be saved their lives and that seems ethical from a utilitarian perspective that thought was defined as “the act is right and moral if it bring “good” end” in this week’s lecture. Also, in this week’s reading, Mill (1863, p. 20) stated that utilitarian standard includes “the greatest amount of happiness” for many people. I do not want say that there is an order among people, but if the passenger on the self-driving car was a worldwide famous person and he or she was killed by the car’s program although many pedestrians could be saved, large numbers of people in the world might be grieve. In that case, the consequence does not bring good end for larger numbers of people, so that cannot be ethical from utilitarian