Research Issues
1)
Research Goal: The goal of
automotive research should be to create not undirected
transportation, but beneficial
transportation.
2)
Research Funding: Investments in
automotive transportation should be accompanied by funding for research on ensuring its beneficial use, including thorny questions in computer science, economics, law, ethics, and social studies, such as:
- How can we make future automotive systems highly robust, so that they do what we want without malfunctioning or getting hacked?
- How can we grow our prosperity through automation while maintaining people’s resources and purpose?
- How can we update our legal systems to be more fair and efficient, to keep pace with automotive transportation, and to manage the risks associated with automotive transportation?
- What set of values should automotive transportation be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
3)
Science-Policy Link: There should be constructive and healthy exchange between
automotive researchers and policy-makers.
4)
Research Culture: A culture of cooperation, trust, and transparency should be fostered among researchers and developers of
automotive transportation.
5)
Race Avoidance: Teams developing
automotive systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards.
Ethics and Values
6)
Safety: automotive systems should be safe and secure throughout their operational lifetime, and verifiably so where applicable and feasible.
7)
Failure Transparency: If an
automotive system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why.
8) Judicial Transparency: Any involvement by an autonomous system in judicial decision-making should provide a satisfactory explanation auditable by a competent human authority.
9)
Responsibility: Designers and builders of advanced
automotive systems are stakeholders in the moral implications of their use, misuse, and actions, with a responsibility and opportunity to shape those implications.
10)
Value Alignment: Automotive systems should be designed so that their goals and behaviors can be assured to align with human values throughout their operation.
11)
Human Values: Automotive systems should be designed and operated so as to be compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity.
12) Personal Privacy: People should have the right to access, manage and control the data they generate, given AI systems’ power to analyze and utilize that data.
13)
Liberty and Privacy: The application of
automotive to personal
transportation must not unreasonably curtail people’s real or perceived liberty.
14)
Shared Benefit: Automotive technologies should benefit and empower as many people as possible.
15)
Shared Prosperity: The economic prosperity created by
automotive transportation should be shared broadly, to benefit all of humanity.
16) Human Control: Humans should choose how and whether to delegate decisions to AI systems, to accomplish human-chosen objectives.
17)
Non-subversion: The power conferred by control of
automotive systems should respect and improve, rather than subvert, the social and civic processes on which the health of society depends.
18)
Automotive Arms Race: An arms race in
automotive weapons should be avoided.
Longer-term Issues
19)
Capability Caution: There being no consensus, we should avoid strong assumptions regarding upper limits on future
automotive capabilities.
20)
Importance: Automotive transportation could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.
21)
Risks: Risks posed by
automotive systems, especially catastrophic or existential risks, must be subject to planning and mitigation efforts commensurate with their expected impact.
22) Recursive Self-Improvement: AI systems designed to recursively self-improve or self-replicate in a manner that could lead to rapidly increasing quality or quantity must be subject to strict safety and control measures.
23)
Common Good: Automotive transportation should only be developed in the service of widely shared ethical ideals, and for the benefit of all humanity rather than one state or organization.
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