Just before the subpoena, Musk had polled his Twitter followers on whether he should sell 10% of his stake in the company. Unlike other social and ethical issues, such as fairness or human autonomy in an AI-dominated society, safety challenges are prone to be solved by technical or engineering approaches (Hagendorff, Citation2020). Tesla is now the world's most valuable car manufacturer as shares surge over 400 per cent, but tech companies like Elon Musk's have big questions to answer over ethically sourced materials. Therefore, we consider their official reports as important pieces of information about the industry's formal stance on the complex ethical issues associated with AVs. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. No less a personage then Elon Musk has compared self-driving cars to horizontal elevators. It was shown earlier that safety considerations are central both in scientific literature and industry reports. The authors acknowledge Nicolas Cointe for his assistance in the linguistic-based text data analytics, the three anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript, and the European Research Council for financial support of this research (ERC Consolidator grant BEHAVE 724431). Some pool into an outdoor tent where they assemble cars. It paid out more than $1 million in a similar case earlier last year. Quite surprisingly, little is known about the ethical issues in focus by the AV industry. Teslas Elon Musk receives support from Trump as he reopens factory in defiance of county order. Guides to banking, saving, investing, insurance, mortgages and pensions. Chinese regulators met with executives from Tesla recently after several government agencies reported an unusual acceleration of complaints from consumers about battery fires and other quality issues with the companys electric cars. Tesla recommended tire rotation every 6,250-7,500 miles until recently, now they recommend rotation every 10,000-12,000 miles, more frequently as needed for aggressive driving. Because extreme traffic situations need to be programmed in advance, AV technology seemed to bring this textbook thought experiment to life thus capturing the attention of scholars and the media. It is stated that If the autonomous driving technology is developed and its use becomes quickly widespread in the future, the responsibility of automobile manufacturers might be brought into question in connection with the decline in drivers engaged in driving If the recalls that the Group has implemented for the benefit of customers' safety become significant in volume and amount, the Group would not only incur significant additional expenses but also experience damage to its brand image, which could adversely affect its financial position and business performance (Nissan, Citation2017). Jane McAlevey, a union organizer who serves as senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeleys Center for Labor Research and Education, said Musks treatment of his workforce has been typical of tech companies in Silicon Valley. Retrieve from https://ir.tesla.com/codebusiness-conduct-and-ethics-, Murphy, C. (2019, September 25). situations in which the autonomous vehicle (AV) is required to make a difficult moral choice. The article said that the anti-slavery economist Siddharth Kara accused Tesla, along with other companies like Apple and Google, of aiding and abetting in the death and injury of children who were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain. While we certainly do not advise to try and establish some form of agreement between industry's views regarding the ethical issues surrounding AVs and those of academia (which would be a tall order anyway, given the wide variety of such views within industry and within academia), we do believe that it would be valuable to both sides of the aisle to inform one another of one's viewpoints. In the first two years, two million people participated in the research, recording more than 40 million decisions. Those complaints have been echoed in surveys about and reviews of the companys cars by J.D. One of the stockholder groups interests is to guarantee that the natural habitat is safeguarded. These concerns have prompted some workers to stay home, comforted by Teslas promises that they could keep their job without pay in the interim. Musk told employees in an email at the time that the factory would remain open and that he would personally report to work, but that they could stay home if they felt uncomfortable or ill. https://www.daimler.com/documents/innovation/other/vssa-mercedes-benz-and-bosch.pdf, https://philpapers.org/archive/FOOTPO-2.pdf, https://www.gm.com/content/dam/company/docs/us/en/gmcom/gmsafetyreport.pdf, https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/transfers/9/2/trans090204.xml, https://global.honda/about/sustainability/report/pdf-download/2015.html, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00964-6, https://www.mando.com/eng/sustainability/sustain13.jsp, https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/pdf/Ford_AV_LLC_FINAL_HR_2.pdf, https://static.mobileye.com/website/corporate/rss/rss_on_nhtsa.pdf, https://group.renault.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/yuho-nissan-fr2016.pdf, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57bcb0e02994ca36c2ee746c/t/5b9a00848a922d8eaecf65a2/15368193586, https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/self-driving-cars/safety-report/auto-print-safety-report-pdf-v16.5(1).pdf, https://newsroom.intel.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2017/10/autonomous-vehicle-safety-strategy.pdf, https://autodocbox.com/Electric_Vehicle/65566194-Automated-driving-at-toyota-vision-strategy-and-development.html, https://docs.huihoo.com/car/Uber-ATGSafety-Report-2018.pdf, https://www.valeo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/VALEO_RA_2016_GB_MEL.pdf, https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/trust-autonomous-white-paper-secure.pdf, https://www.daimler.com/documents/innovation/other/safety-first-for-automated-driving.pdf, https://zoox.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Safety_Report_12Dec2018.pdf. it is stated that their Responsibility-Sensitive-Safety system will always brake in time to avoid a collision with a pedestrian unless the pedestrian is running super-humanly fast (Shashua & Shalev-Shwartz, Citation2017). Heres who should get the second covid booster and when. This includes calling a scuba diving expert who was rescuing children from a cave in Thailand a pedo, a remark that landed him in court for defamation. These principles, formulated upon analyses of the moral intuitions that emerge in stylised cases, would ultimately guide the AV design process (Keeling, Citation2020; Wu, Citation2019). In A Matter of Trust Ford's Approach to Developing Self-Driving Vehicles, it is stated that for autonomous vehicles to be accepted by the public it needs to be established that they can be trusted (Marakby, Citation2018) and in Intel's white paper A Matter of Trust: How Smart Design Can Accelerate Automated Vehicle Adoption, trust is also emphasised when it is stated that before driverless AVs can be widely accepted, people must be willing to trust them with their lives and the lives of those they care about hence AVs must behave, react, and communicate in ways that make it easy for people to trust them not only the passengers inside, but also pedestrians and the other drivers who encounter them on the road (Weast, Yurdana, & Jordan, Citation2016). We use this list of AI ethical issues to guide us in identifying the ethics within the scientific and industry narratives. We started by creating lexicons, i.e. The proponents of the MME acknowledge that AV policy should not necessarily follow public expectations and preferences but they believe that such preferences should not be completely dismissed. 2023. Elon Musk is worth $270 billion. The ethics of accident-algorithms for self-driving cars: An applied trolley problem? We are. This research has received funding from the European Research Council: Consolidator Grant BEHAVE (grant agreement 724431). Perhaps surprisingly for an electric car company, Tesla faces a lot of fines for pollution. Tesla sues Alameda county, alleging that the county's continuing shelter-in-place order is unconstitutional. General claims have been made about the struggles of companies over such issues but these lack proper substantiation (Awad et al., Citation2018; Fagnant & Kockelman, Citation2015; Kirkpatrick, Citation2015). The state of public health: Conservative and libertarian forces have defanged much of the nations public health system through legislation and litigation as the world staggers into the fourth year of covid. At this point, it should be noted that the main aim of this paper is not to present an exhaustive review of the scholarly literature concerning ethical issues surrounding the development and deployment of AVs. The company's 2019 Impact Report addressed the concerns surrounding its cobalt supplies, asserting that its practices are in line with the OECD Guidelines on Responsible Sourcing from Conflict Affected and High Risk Areas and made transparent through the Responsible Minerals Initiative, an industry-led minerals tracing program intended to improve ethical sourcing of raw materials. While these debates are certainly very rich, we found this stream of the literature to be quite fragmented. We found one statement that somewhat resembles the AV moral dilemma, with one important caveat regarding the nature of harms at stake. As private companies are highly influential on the development and acceptance of AV technologies (Van den Hoven, Vermaas, & Van de Poel, Citation2015), their stance on ethics should be taken into account for the purposes of a meaningful debate about the ethics of AVs. Clearly, our study has its limitations, which we would like to highlight once more at this point. In order for AVs to successfully deal with mundane traffic situations, companies propose advanced sensing and AI-powered solutions. When designing a crash collision algorithm, a manufacturer is assumed to face three options while balancing ethics and liability: (i) program an algorithm to swerve in a direction that would sacrifice fewer lives but would entail high liability due to compensatory and punitive damages for intentional conduct caused by targeting the sacrificed people; (ii) allow the AV to run its course which would entail a larger number of lives sacrificed but lower liability which would then be restricted to compensatory damages; and (iii) avoid a collision, which if successful, entails that no lives are sacrificed but if unsuccessful, entails the largest number of lives sacrificed, but in either case entails the lowest liability (Wu, Citation2019). Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area become the first locales in the US to order all non-essential businesses to close and require residents to shelter in place. The amazing fact is that every Tesla is actually carefully constructed to last a lifetime or 100 years (!) The debug screen of a complex autonomous system is incomprehensible to the untrained eye. Phillips said he takes the risk into account but also needs to work to keep a steady paycheck. It was mentioned earlier that companies acknowledge that AV technology will not eliminate accidents, yet some companies are invested in developing AVs which will never cause or be responsible for accidents (By formally defining the parameters of the dangerous situation and proper response, we can say that responsibility is assigned to the party who did not comply with the proper response. Tesla is leading the way in terms of introducing new clean transportation and clean energy products to market. As legal scholars are working on extensions to criminal and civil law (Funkhouser, Citation2013; Gurney, Citation2013, Citation2015), it is questioned whether liability legal frameworks should be designed in such a way that would not impede, but rather promote, the development and improvement of AVs (Hevelke & Nida-Rmelin, Citation2015). They rely on masks to keep them safe, the worker said, wearing them for up to 12 hours. Rachel Flynn is a deputy executive for Fairfax County. A worker wearing a face covering exits a Tesla Inc. vehicle at the company's assembly plant in Fremont, California, U.S., on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020. The billionaire has defied shelter-in-place orders and styled himself as an anti-lockdown hero. In this case, the firms electric cars, batteries, and solar energy panelsaddress such interests. Another Twitter diatribe by Musk wipes about $13bn off Teslas market value, after he declares that he plans to sell almost all physical possessions, including his house(s), and then opines that Teslas stock price is too high imo. Register to receive personalised research and resources by email. Telsa. Das Naes Unidas 14401, Torre Hotel Chcara Santo Antnio So Paulo, BR-SP. New covid variant: A new coronavirus subvariant, XBB. Employees are encouraged to make new friends, strive to be the best that they can be and take on new and exciting challenges. They did not say how the permit revision could impact timing for start of production. The statements that we identified in the AV reports regarding human oversight relate more to the first condition of the Human Meaningful Control theory, but we also report one statement which relates to the tracing condition with respect to the understanding of the system. It should therefore not come as a surprise that this ambiguity at an abstract level may translate into different (implicit) meanings attached to the same word, in different industry reports. There was questionable ethical conduct galore in the recently-stilled ethics wreck sparked by a New York Times review of the new Tesla electric car, the Model S. Times reporter John Broder test drove the car from Washington, D.C., to Boston, using the charging stations Tesla has opened along the way. Musk allegedly hired investigators to hack an employees phone, spied on his messages and misled police about a potential mass shooting, according to Sean Gouthro, a former security manager at the companys Nevada Gigafactory. The ethics of crashes with self-driving cars: A roadmap, I. development of an autonomous vehicle there are infinite edge cases that may be difficult or dangerous to reproduce in reality, such as illegal driving behaviours or sudden traffic accidents The Autox Safety Factor AutoX, Citation2018). Bay Area officials extend their shelter-in-place orders through 3 May. Tesla beats analyst expectations for the quarter, delivering its third straight quarterly profit despite the major coronavirus disruptions. Advertise with CleanTechnica to get your company in front of millions of monthly readers. ); Over time, though, Guardian capability will grow steadily as technology improves, with a goal of creating a vehicle never responsible for a crash regardless of errors made by a human driver Toyota, Citationn.d.). This discussion, of course, was driven by Zachary Shahans recent discussion with Elon Musk regarding the rapid advances coming soon to a Tesla near you. Tesla has issued reports on its efforts around environmental, social and governance issues. The video is removed by YouTube for promoting harmful misinformation, and the doctors are jointly and emphatically condemn[ed] by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine. Interestingly, Hagendorff is reluctant about the effectiveness of AI ethics guidelines. The most important thing, according to the handbook, is that it's everyones job to help make the company successful. A few days ago, my esteemed colleague Maarten Vinkhuyzen posted an excellent article on self-driving systems that explores the difference between being 10 times safer or 10 times better than a human driver. We also cover issues such as e-waste, privacy, big tech and reducing our carbon footprint. Workers periodically sanitize equipment, particularly after breaks, but theres little enforcement and we hardly do that, the worker said. latest-news-headlines I would expect the tolerance for injuries caused by autonomous cars to be about the same as it would be for an elevator that suddenly plunges from the penthouse to the parking garage without warning. Tesla will face many issues, but there are so many opportunities open to the company that . Although, as we argued above, we believe that such documents hold important clues regarding the views of industry actors e.g. (The jury ultimately ruled in Musks favor.) AImotive states that test operators face their own unique challenges. All of papers you get at # 1 Best Assignment Help Website Online are meant for research purposes only. MASSIVE Electric Bike Buyers Guide All the Biggest Brands & Models, NIO ES8 The Chinese Electric SUV Outselling The Tesla Model X, Nukes, Renewables, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, Reality Check Correcting the Cleantech Record, Solar Panel Installers Top Solar Panel Installers & How To Evaluate Them, Switching to an Electric Fleet Learn About Charging, Payments, & More, Testimonials: Why Readers Love CleanTechnica. At some meetings, workers stand three feet apart instead of six feet, one worker said. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. The amount of attention that AV technology ethics has received in recent years is quite new to the field of Transportation. Following the review of the scientific literature, we proceeded to the document review of AV business and technical reports, relying on the list of ethical issues mentioned above, to identify the relevant issues within the industry narratives. Tesla does not comply. Covid-19 remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, tied to about 250 deaths daily, on average, mostly among the old and immunocompromised. These documents are, nevertheless, important pieces of information to learn the industry's formal stance on the complex ethical issues associated with AVs. A few years ago, researchers at MITs Media Lab created an online experience they call the Moral Machine that allows people to answer such ethically loaded questions online. They would not be penalized, he said. a parked car) even at that maximal speed - Intel Implementing the RSS Model on NHTSA Pre-Crash ScenariosFootnote4 (Mobileye, Citationn.d. Regarding the solutions proposed by industry to address extreme traffic situations, we report for now that companies rely on radars and speed limitation to address the problem of blind spots which are often at the root of these traffic situations. Got a confidential news tip? Its a matter of particular concern on the vehicle production lines, where multiple workers touch components and share machinery. Most of these articles are theoretical pieces of research, often written as argumentative or normative essays, about different perspectives and dimensions of the AV moral dilemma. They also complain of little transparency by the company about new cases of infection, as well as its response. This is a BETA experience. A shareholder proposal scheduled for a vote at Tesla's 2020 annual general meeting, which was scheduled for July 7 but has been indefinitely postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, requests input on whether the automaker should prepare a report on its processes for "embedding respect for human rights" within its operations and business relationships. Why Social Responsibility Matters to Businesses. Coordination over different technical approaches to these traffic situations is crucial to ensure safety but it is unclear how such technological coordination can be facilitated in the competitive AV market (Himmelreich, Citation2018). PPE is thrown on the ground after being used. (2017). Guides for finding ethical and environmentally friendly food brands. (vii) Therefore AVs should be programmed with x. Teslas handbook is like its founderno-nonsense, direct and to the point, holds people accountable and sets forth the requirements clearly and concisely. The EPA accused Tesla last week of failing to prove it is in compliance with federal emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants. There was the big lawsuit that started it all way back in 2009, when Musk and Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard duked it out over the latters termination as CEO. There is an understanding that if youre sick, you stay home. Shashua & Shalev-Shwartz, Citation2017). Many loyal customers and investors love the company and its flamboyant CEO, who also exhibits humility at times. There are unsettled considerations about the acceptable safety and cybersecurity levels of AVs, both in mundane and extreme situations, in order to secure the well-being of users and other traffic agents (Kalra & Paddock, Citation2016; Parkinson, Ward, Wilson, & Miller, Citation2017; Sparrow & Howard, Citation2017). Mark Newman, a senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC, said in a July 1 interview that a substantial reason companies have begun work on cobalt-free or cobalt-light batteries is the "somewhat shady history" of the metal and difficulty confirming the absence of ethically tainted material in the supply chain. A common hypothetical involves a choice between taking an action that will kill either 5 people or only 2 people. The Post reported earlier in June that workers at the factorys seat assembly plant were told multiple colleagues had tested positive for the coronavirus and Alameda County officials confirmed Tesla had reported coronavirus cases in Fremont. Tesla scored poorly across the remainder of our ratings that related to human and workers rights, receiving for example a worst rating for Supply Chain Management. We also cover issues such as palm oil, soya, low carbon diets and labels. Accountability: An ever-expanding concept? While the handbook calls for safety and the company wants you to go home every day in the same condition you arrived, there have been allegations of violations of safety. Californias governor, Gavin Newsom, issues a statewide shelter-in-place order.
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