TOW #10 – “Helping Autonomous Vehicles And Humans Share The Road”

In our modern era of technological advancements and efficiencies, items such as the autonomous vehicle are being developed without a truly clear understanding of the implications of such an item. Jeffrey Peters, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, raised an important question to this age of development in his editorial, “Helping Autonomous Vehicles And Humans Share The Road.” Through the use of hypophora and rhetorical questioning, as well as didacticism, Peters opens the conversation surrounding self-driving cars to determine a safe way to incorporate the technology into our modern society. In the introduction, Peters questions, “How should we program them to handle difficult situations?” (Peters) which remains a major theme throughout the editorial. This employment of hypophora opens discussion to the underlying subtopic, which surrounds the ethics of programming a vehicle to determine the ‘greatest good of society,’ as suggested from any utilitarianism’s perspective. Still, Peters continues from this starting point to suggest the “ambiguity” of decision making, allowing him to employ another device: didacticism. The moral dilemma suggested by this era of intelligent technology is the extent to which humans should transfer that ambiguous decision making process to technology. Relying on the psychology’s most recurrent motif, the “trolley problem,” Peters examines how many variables can impact a life or death decision. The problem originally weighs quantitative data to determine the ‘greatest good’ of the situation, but via a rhetorical question, Peters investigates, “Would you, for example, save five children and let a senior citizen die?” (Peters). Sequentially, in order to deliver his didactic reasoning, Peters later compares, “…would an autonomous car that noticed a child running in the middle of traffic decide to run over your grandmother on the sidewalk instead?” (Peters). While either question may have a seemingly ‘right’ answer, Peters suggests that establishing a trust relationship with technology could, in the short-term, bring greater harms than benefits. Supported with sound reasoning, delivered using hypophora and didacticism, Peters effectively upholds an argument that while there is a clear issue with relying upon autonomous vehicles, they could prove beneficial to efficiency, and ultimately, utility.

Works Cited

Peters, Jeffrey C. “Helping Autonomous Vehicles and Humans Share the Road.” The Conversation, 15 Nov. 2016, theconversation.com/helping-autonomous-vehicles-and-humans-share-the-road-68044.