In a few years, all cars will be driven with the precision of Michael Schumacher, respecting calculations of the caliber of Richard Feynman, and will be capable of solving philosophical problems as if they were Immanuel Kant. Yuval Harari suggests something similar in his books, and I feel he has hit the mark.
Another alternative proposed in response to the previous section is that when Tesla, or another company, in the near future designs its fully autonomous vehicle, they will have to solve theoretical problems, inherent to the field of philosophy, with engineering for all of us. It is also possible that Tesla, or these companies, may not want to make the final decision, and as Harari suggests[71], leave it to the market, producing two models, an Altruistic model and an Egoistic model.
The Altruistic model would sacrifice its driver if it would result in a greater benefit, while the Egoistic model would try everything in its power to preserve the life of its driver. People would be free to choose which model they prefer for themselves, bringing this moral dilemma to the tables of families and friends around the world, perhaps opening a new rift.
Regardless of whether autonomous vehicles turn out to be altruistic or egoistic, security forces will have an even bigger problem. When deliveries through on-demand apps like Rappi, UberEats, or PedidosYa became widespread, I wondered if this didn’t open a new channel for drug distribution through street-level drug dealing. I mean, what prevents a drug dealer from making deliveries through these services? If the person is stopped while making the delivery, that will be the person who gets into trouble first. But, have you ever seen security forces stopping one of these delivery people on the street to check their merchandise? Well, no, firstly, we all have the right to free movement, and secondly, no one wants to bother another worker earning their daily income. Today, without clear statistics on this, I dare to think of a new scenario and problem.
Autonomous vehicles will reduce shipping costs for transport companies and their customers, even for criminals. When these vehicles dominate the streets, they will very likely be easily used to traffic drugs, weapons, and other illegal market goods.
It will be rare for these vehicles to be stopped for breaking a traffic rule, so how will we control them? Currently, security forces have no way to check all the vehicles on the road, not to mention, of course, that this would violate free movement.
While vehicles are registered in the name of a person or entity, making it still easy to think that if a car is stopped with illegal objects, we can find its owner, nothing would prevent setting up a transport company with these vehicles and distributing the merchandise through clients or false clients who request your taxi service, thus adding an extra alibi in case of detection.
Looking ahead in terms of legislation, it is possible that the regulation of autonomous vehicles will include storing the vehicle’s location and visited destinations, recordings of everything observed by the vehicle’s 360° cameras, and logs of every time a door, window, or trunk is opened. What would happen even if the vehicle breaks a traffic rule, as unlikely as that may be? In real life, if we commit a violation and a police officer sees us, they will signal us to stop and inform us of our violation. But in the case of an autonomous vehicle, how do we tell it to stop? Will it self-fine? Will the police be able to take remote control of autonomous vehicles and effectively register it? I believe so.
[71] Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau. Common Crawl. Commoncrawl.org. Retrieved July 13, 2021, from https://commoncrawl.org.