Simulating Ethical Trade-Offs in Autonomous Driving

As autonomous vehicle (AV) technology advances, ethical questions surrounding its implementation and integration become increasingly apparent. This work explores the potential of leveraging CARLA, an open-source driving simulator for AVs in urban environments, to simulate ethical dilemmas that could occur in real-world self-driving car scenarios. A scenario depicting a more likely, less emotionally loaded ethical dilemma was desired in response to AV ethics' seeming overfocus on the Trolley Problem. Additionally, the framing of the chosen dilemma as a trade-off became a central concept and contribution of the work. Brief reviews of the existing AV ethics literature and key technologies are provided, and similar works described. Then, a scenario involving an ambulance exiting a congested highway is defined and implemented with the specific ethical trade-off of privacy vs. efficiency in mind. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication levels are used as markers of privacy, while the elapsed simulation time for the ambulance to reach its goal measures efficiency. Thus, the privacy-efficiency trade-off is evaluated at different levels of privacy sacrifice, where privacy can be discussed qualitatively and efficiency quantitatively. Experimental results determine that the simulation grows more efficient as privacy sacrifice increases, though partly due to biases in devised agent behaviors. The use of a trade-off for analysis in combination with simulation software is emphasized as the most significant contribution and encouraged for future AV ethics work.