The translations are horrible. The original is at http://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt-bericht-der-ethik-kommission.pdf?__blob=publicatio

The translations are horrible. The original is at http://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt-bericht-der-ethik-kommission.pdf?__blob=publicationFile http://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt-.... Some of the less obvious thoughts: - If it can be shown that self-driving systems will lead to fewer accidents, the government will have an obligation to allow them–even if some accidents may continue to happen. - The focus should be on avoiding those situations where technology has to make morally ambiguous decisions - Where such life-vs-life decisions do happen, it would be immoral to assign different values to the individual lives on the basis of sex, age or other characteristics. - In principle, it would be possible to allow decisions trying to minimise the lives lost/put at risk, i. e. sacrificing one life to save two. - But: they also deem it immoral to sacrifices the life of people who did not participate in the creation of the traffic risk themselves.(1) This means, for example, that system may not "sacrifice" one pedestrian for two (or even one) passengers of the car. - Liability will move from the owner/operator to the producers of cars - The technology, and the decisions it implements, must be communicated to the public - It's unclear if traffic should be directed by some central authority. Such centralisation would need to find a way to operate in a way that makes it impossible to create profiles of individuals' movements - The car's owner must always agree to the sharing and usage of their data. This requires not just the theoretically choice, but the real possibility to say no, and realistic options to do so without undue consequences. - It must be both obvious at the moment, as well as after the fact, if the car was being operated by its software or by the driver. 1: That's a possibly unintuitive offshoot of another principle in German law. Say you're a drunk pedestrian who stumbles into the street. A car swerves, hits a tree, and the car's passenger is killed. Who is at fault? The somewhat unintuitive result is: the driver is at fault (meaning his insurance will have to pay for damages). The reasoning: Those travelling in cars derive all the value of car traffic. The pedestrian may have made a mistake–but they would never have been in a situation where it was possible to make that mistake, without others seeking the benefit of car traffic. Therefore, the pedestrian is never liable (unless, obviously, they act intentionally)