The ethics of self-driving cars

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Self-driving cars promise to reduce the accidents caused by human error, which account for the great majority of road deaths. Yet they also raise difficult ethical questions. In rare situations where a collision is unavoidable, how should a vehicle be programmed to act, and who bears responsibility when something goes wrong? Engineers, lawyers and philosophers are grappling with problems that have no easy answers. Public trust, meanwhile, depends not only on the technology working reliably but on people believing that the decisions built into these machines are fair. The technical challenges, in other words, may prove easier to solve than the moral ones.