Experts warn no easy answer to how safe self-driving cars should be

2 years ago

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Experts warn no easy answer to how safe self-driving cars should be

Chris Vallance - Technology reporter

Fri, August 19, 2022, 9:28 AM·4 min read

An illustration of a man in a self driving car

There is no easy answer as to how safe self-driving cars should be, an adviser to a new government-backed report has told the BBC.

The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) report warns that it might not be enough for self-driving cars to be safer than human drivers.

It suggests the public may have much higher expectations of self-driving car safety.

This comes as the government details plans for self-driving cars.

These include a 'safety ambition' for vehicles: that they should be as safe as a competent human driver.

It says this will inform standards that need to be reached to 'self-drive' on the roads, and manufacturers could face sanctions if they are not met.

But the CDEI, an expert body which advises governments on artificial intelligence, says the question of how safe autonomous vehicles should be is not one science alone can answer.

It says the public may have little tolerance for crashes that are seen as the fault of "faceless technology companies or lax regulation" even if, it adds, on average driverless cars are safer than humans.

And if the public expect self-driving cars to be as safe as trains or planes, it would require a hundred-fold increase in average safety over manually driven cars, it warns.

"What we wanted to do was say there's not an easy answer to this question" said Professor Jack Stilgoe of University College London who advised the CDEI. He suggested that establishing how safe they should be was a democratic decision.

The CDEI says it is also important to consider how risk is distributed between different groups. Even if there are improvements in overall safety, "some groups may see substantial safety improvements while others see none or even face new hazards".

Biased drivers

The report advises that other risks will need scrutiny as the technology is rolled out.

One is the potential for bias in algorithms controlling the cars.

It warns that some groups, such as wheelchair users, may be underrepresented in data used to train the software algorithms which control the cars - potentially causing bias.

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