AI & SOCIETY - Special issue on Ethics and Autonomous Vehicles: Understanding the ethical issues that arise with the introduction of self-driving and highly automated vehicles
Guest Editors
Dr Veljko Dubljevic, NC State University, United States of America, veljko_dubljevic[AT]ncsu.edu
Dr George List, NC State University, United States of America, gflist[AT]ncsu.edu
Dr. William A. Bauer, NC State University, United States of America, wabauer[AT]ncsu.edu
Dr. Munindar P. Singh, NC State University, United States of America, mpsingh[AT]ncsu.edu
The expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems has shown great potential to generate enormous social good while also raising serious ethical and safety concerns. It is therefore important to apply interdisciplinary research methods and tools to comprehensively analyze the social and ethical implications of AI embodied in autonomous vehicles (AVs).
Importantly, AVs will take actions that directly affect human life and societal well-being. Thus, it is imperative to analyze ethical concerns related to AVs to identify at-risk populations, inform policy, and generate hypotheses for future empirical ethics research on AI. Identifying norms and accounting for multiple ethical issues related to AVs will increase public confidence that the diverse values of a pluralistic society can be successfully implemented.
Special Issue Themes
This Special Issue of AI & Society (AI&S) will expand critical scholarly research by introducing and examining the topic of Ethics and AVs. The aim of this special issue is to curate and present state-of-the-art work on this area with broader implications of automation in transportation settings. Topics and themes will include:
- Theoretical considerations: e.g., ethical guidance functions for AVs, wellbeing for riders, models of societal values in the context of transportation, distributive justice concerns regarding driver job loss and displacement.
- Case studies: operationalized policies and reflections on successful and failed implementation attempts of AV technologies in society.
- Risk-based explorations: studies exploring expert and public perceptions of social risks inherent in the implementation of AV freight and passenger vehicles in highway and densely populated environments.
- Methods and approaches: presenting various approaches to researching ethics in reference to AVs from interdisciplinary perspectives.
- Thematic issues: e.g. critical analyses of urban AV implementations; ethical dilemmas of deploying AVs in urban spaces and densely populated environments; identifying use cases and users of AVs; consequences of AVs on urban, suburban and rural life and infrastructures; safety and security with AVs; sustainability and AVs; and so forth.
How the Special Issue relates to current research
AVs gained public recognition through the three DARPA challenges in 2004, 2005, and 2007 (Zhang 2016). However, even though the public was bombarded with information about AVs, not enough work has assessed public opinion on AVs in more than a cursory way. Thus, a systematic study of public expectations and experiences in terms of the harms and benefits of AV technology is ethically imperative and central to the social evaluation of AI in general. Previous work on public engagement on the incorporation of AVs in society has been limited in scope and was conducted in Europe (see Ryan 2019) or Australia (Pettigrew et al. 2018). Furthermore, the majority of approaches use fictional scenarios (Nyholm & Smids 2016, Nyholm 2018, Awad et al. 2018), despite potential drawbacks, such as vagueness, lack of structure, and unclear policy implications (see Ryan 2019).
Expert consultations in some countries have generated sources of value-based judgments that do not necessarily translate well to other contexts. For instance, the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, and this committee issued a code of ethics. This code of ethics states that “protection of individuals takes precedence over all utilitarian considerations” and “Automated driving is justifiable only to the extent to which conceivable attacks, in particular manipulation of the IT system or innate system weaknesses, do not result in such harm as to lastingly shatter people’s confidence in road transport” (Luetge 2017, p. 549,554). Such general claims are interesting but not shared globally, and fail to address important issues such as how the AV technology could be programmed to resist malicious actors, such as terrorists (Chopra & Singh 2018, Dubljevic 2020), which kinds of ethical guidance functions should be implemented in Avs (Leben, 2017, Bauer 2018, Cecchini et al. 2023) or how social justice issues can be safeguarded during the implementation of AVs in the socio-economic system (Dubljevic & Bauer 2022).
Also, understanding the experiences of specific people likely to be affected by AV technology is essential for the identification of relevant social and ethical concerns (Dubljevic et al. 2022). Expert assessments have been shown to be subject to the “overconfidence effect,” which was observed in physicians, clinical psychologists, lawyers, negotiators, engineers, and security analysts (Mellers & Locke 2007). Therefore, there is an increased need for empirical work on the ethical and social issues in AVs that would explore stakeholder opinions and values in different societies and jurisdictions.
Finally, it is important to study the risks inherent in the implementation of AVs. The risk profile associated with different types of AV implementation varies from high (e.g., privately owned passenger AVs in heavily populated areas) to low (e.g., industry-owned freight AVs limited to highways). However, the actual risk posed by AV technology is dependent on a complex mixture of social, technological, behavioral, and environmental variables (Dubljevic et al. 2021).
Understanding the societal and ethical implications of AI systems such as autonomous vehicles inherently involves many concerns: the nature and capabilities of these technologies, how humans can and should use them, how humans will respond to the presence of AVs in the traffic stream and the AV technology’s impact on socioeconomic structures. Thus, producing new knowledge in this area requires the expertise of multiple disciplines and this special issue of AI & Society seeks to serve as a crucial incubator for evidence and ideas pertaining to this domain of AI.
Contribution Types
We welcome contributions across the following formats:
Original papers (max 10k words): substantial contribution, theory, method, application. Contributions may be experimental, based on case studies, or conceptual discussions of how AI systems affect organisations, society and humans. Original papers will be double blind peer-reviewed by two reviewers and the editorial team.
Open Forum papers (max 8k words): research in progress, ideas paper. Contributions may come from researchers, practitioners and others interested in the topics of the special issue. Contributions might be, but not limited to, discussion papers, literature reviews, case studies, working papers, features, and articles on emerging research. Papers published in the open forum target a broad audience i.e. academics, designers as well as the average reader. Open Forum contributions will be double blind peer-reviewed by two reviewers and the editorial team.
Student papers (max 6k words): research in progress. Contributions may come from post-graduate students and Ph.D. students interested in the topics of the special issue. For articles that are based primarily on the student’s dissertation or thesis, it is recommended that the student is usually listed as principal author. Papers are double blind peer-reviewed by one reviewer and the editorial team.
Curmudgeon papers (max 1k words): short opinionated column on trends in technology, science and society, commenting on issues of concern to the research community and wider society. Whilst the drive for artificial intelligence promotes potential benefits to wider society, it also raises deep concerns of existential risk, thereby highlighting the need for an ongoing conversation between technology and society. At the core of Curmudgeon concern is the question: What are the political-philosophical concepts regarding the present sphere of AI technology? Curmudgeon articles will be reviewed by the Journal editors.
Important Dates
Abstract submission: 31st January 2025
Manuscript submission: 30th August 2025
Notifications: 30th December 2025
Revised papers due: 31st January 2026
Submission Formatting
You can find more information about formatting under the section “Submission guidelines” https://link.springer.com/journal/146/submission-guidelines (this opens in a new tab). For inquiries and to submit your abstract, please contact: Aisocietyncstate[AT]gmail.com with the subject “AI&S Special issue on Ethics and AVs.”
References
Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, R., Henrich, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, J.-F., & Rahwan, I. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature, 563 (7729), 59-64. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6
Bauer, W. A. (2018). Virtuous vs. utilitarian artificial moral agents. AI & Society, 34(2):1–9.
Cecchini, D., Brantley, S. and Dubljević, V. (2023): Moral judgment in realistic traffic scenarios: Moving beyond the trolley paradigm for the ethics of AVs, AI & Society, Accepted.
Chopra, A. K. & Singh, M. P (2018). Sociotechnical systems and ethics in the large. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) (pp.48–53). New Orleans: ACM.
Dubljević, V. (2020): Toward Implementing the ADC Model of Moral Judgment in Autonomous Vehicles, Science & Engineering Ethics, DOI: 10.1007/s11948-020-00242-0.
Dubljević, V., List, G, Milojevich, J, Ajmeri, N, Bauer, WA, Singh MP, et al. (2021): Toward a Rational and Ethical Sociotechnical System of Autonomous Vehicles: A Novel Application of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. PLoS ONE, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0256224.
Dubljević, V., Douglas, S., Milojevich, J., Ajmeri, N., Bauer, W.A., List, G. & Singh, M. (2022): Moral and Social Ramifications of Autonomous Vehicles: A Qualitative Study of the Perceptions of Professional Drivers. Behaviour & Information Technology, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2070078 (this opens in a new tab)
Dubljević, V. & Bauer, W.A. (2022): Autonomous Vehicles and Basic Structure of Society, in Jenkins, R., Cerny, D. & Hrybek, T. (Eds.): Autonomous Vehicles Ethics, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 295-319.
Leben, D. (2017). A Rawlsian algorithm for autonomous vehicles. Ethics and Information Technology, 19(2):107–115.
Luetge C. (2017). The German Ethics Code for Automated and Connected Driving. Philosophy & Technology. 30(4):547-558.
Mellers, B., & Locke, C. (2007). What have we learned from our mistakes? In W. Edwards, R. H. Miles Jr, D. von Winterfeldt, (Eds.), Advances in decision analysis: From foundations to applications (pp. 351-374). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Nyholm, S. (2018). The ethics of crashing with self-driving cars: A roadmap, II. Philosophy Compass, 13(17), e12506.
Nyholm, S., & Smids, J. (2016). The ethics of accident-algorithms for self-driving cars: An applied trolley problem? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19(5), 1275–1289.
Pettigrew, S., Fritschi, L. & Norman, R. (2018). The Potential Implications of Autonomous Vehicles in and around the Workplace. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15(1876): 1-10.
Ryan, M. (2019). Scenario: self-driving vehicles: navigating towards an ethical future. SHERPA [web- site]. Retrieved August 15, 2019 from https://www.project- sherpa.eu/scenarios/self-driving-cars-complete/.
Zhang, X., Gao, H., Guo, M., Li, G., Liu, Y., & Li, D. (2016). A Study on Key Technologies of Unmanned Driving. CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology, 1(1), 4-13.