Toward a rational and ethical sociotechnical system of autonomous vehicles: A novel application of multi-criteria decision analysis

PLoS One. 2021 Aug 13;16(8):e0256224. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256224. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment of the harms and benefits of their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts to assess the significance of 13 potential harms and eight potential benefits that might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, we considered: (1) the status quo, i.e., no AVs are deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, i.e., no regulatory control would be exercised and commercial entities would "push" the development and deployment; (3) regulated introduction, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and either private individuals or commercial fleet operators could own the AVs; and (4) fleets only, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and only commercial fleet operators could own the AVs. Our results suggest that two of these scenarios, (3) and (4), namely regulated privately-owned introduction or fleet ownership or autonomous vehicles would be less likely to cause harm than either the status quo or the unfettered options.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Accidents, Traffic / prevention & control
  • Attitude
  • Automation / ethics*
  • Automation / legislation & jurisprudence
  • Automobile Driving / psychology
  • Autonomous Vehicles / ethics*
  • Autonomous Vehicles / legislation & jurisprudence
  • Decision Support Techniques
  • Humans
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Morals
  • Ownership / economics*
  • Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

Dr. Veljko Dubljevic, along with Drs. Bauer, List and Singh, received support for this study from the Kenan Institute of Science and Technology and North Carolina State University Research and Innovation Seed Funding (RISF 2019) The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.