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Regulating Autonomous Vehicles: A Policy Proposal

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Abstract

The widespread deployment and testing of autonomous vehicles in real-world environments raises key questions about how such systems should be regulated. Much of the current debate presupposes that the regulatory system we currently use for regular vehicles is also appropriate for semi- and fully-autonomous ones. In opposition, we first argue that there are serious challenges to regulating autonomous vehicles using current approaches, due to the nature of both autonomous capabilities (and their connections to operational domains), and also the systems' tasks and surrounding uncertainties. Instead, we argue that vehicles with autonomous capabilities are similar in key respects to drugs and other medical inter-ventions. Thus, we propose (on a "first principles" basis) a dynamic regulatory system with staged approvals and monitoring, analogous to the system used by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. We provide details about the operation of such a potential system, and conclude by characterizing its benefits, costs, and plausibility.
Regulating Autonomous Vehicles: A Policy Proposal
Alex John London
Department of Philosophy; Center for Ethics & Policy
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
ajlondon@andrew.cmu.edu
David Danks
Department of Philosophy; Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
ddanks@cmu.edu
ABSTRACT
The widespread deployment and testing of autonomous vehicles
in real-world environments raises key questions about how such
systems should be regulated. Much of the current debate
presupposes that the regulatory system we currently use for
regular vehicles is also appropriate for semi- and fully-
autonomous ones. In opposition, we first argue that there are
serious challenges to regulating autonomous vehicles using
current approaches, due to the nature of both autonomous
capabilities (and their connections to operational domains), and
also the systems’ tasks and surrounding uncertainties. Instead,
we argue that vehicles with autonomous capabilities are similar
in key respects to drugs and other medical interventions. Thus,
we propose (on a “first principles” basis) a dynamic regulatory
system with staged approvals and monitoring, analogous to the
system used by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. We
provide details about the operation of such a potential system,
and conclude by characterizing its benefits, costs, and
plausibility.
KEYWORDS
Autonomous systems; Regulation; Ethics; Context
ACM Reference format:
Alex John London and David Danks. 2018. Regulating Autonomous
Vehicles: A Policy Proposal. In Proceedings of 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference
on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ‘18), AIES '18, February 23, 2018, New
Orleans, LA, USA, ACM, NY, NY, USA, 7 pages.
https://doi:10.1145/3278721.3278763
1 Introduction
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of learning, inferring,
planning, and deciding are rapidly moving from a curiosity to an
everyday sight in many cities. Much of the debate and discussion
about AVs has centered on technological issues and questions:
where do they function properly? what are their limits? and so
forth. We instead focus here on human-centric concerns and
responses. In particular, we develop a “first principles” analysis
of AV regulation: how (on conceptual grounds) ought we
regulate vehicles with autonomous capabilities (independently of
local regulatory or legal traditions)?
Current proposals of regulations and guidelineslegal,
scientific, and ethicalfor AVs (e.g., [6, 9, 12, 13]) largely
presuppose that existing regulatory systems for non-
autonomous vehicles can be suitably modified for AVs. We argue
instead that current regulatory systems are, as a type, unsuited
to the task of regulating AVs. Thus, we cannot simply expand or
generalize the scope and powers of existing regulatory agencies,
but rather must use a different type of approach. In particular,
there are important similarities between our knowledge states
for (i) vehicles with autonomous capabilities; and (ii) new drugs
and other medical interventions. Both domains involve
significant interactions, changing or non-stationary
environments, (relative) ignorance about many causal factors,
and other parallels. We thus propose a novel regulatory system
for AVs, modeled on those for regulating medical interventions.
Section 2 is largely negative: it provides a series of
arguments and reasons against the use of current regulatory
systems for non-autonomous vehicles. Section 3 is, in contrast,
largely positive: we provide the key details for the dynamic,
flexible regulatory system that we favor, and draw out the
analogy with U.S. systems for regulating and approving novel
pharmaceutical agents or other medical interventions. Of course,
any regulatory system is potentially a double-edged sword, so
Section 4 examines both benefits and drawbacks of our proposal,
as well as consideration of its feasibility.
2 Performance Standards and Autonomy
In AVs, decisions and tasks that were once the sole
province of human drivers are carried out by the vehicle itself.
The AV would thus typically need to be “licensed” as both a
vehicle and a driver, but those approvals traditionally have quite
different bases. Vehicle regulation focuses on performance
standards for their operation in well-defined contexts. Driver
regulation involves licensure requirements based on knowledge
of rules of the road, context recognition, and other decision
making. This latter license tests human abilities under the
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DOI: https://doi:10.1145/3278721.3278763
assumption that relevant knowledge and navigation of a simple
test course are sufficient to assess human abilities that drivers
will require for arbitrary real world driving tasks. There is no
regulatory system that can assess the ability of the vehicle to
achieve tasks performed by human drivers within vague or
unknown contexts, while conforming to relevant norms.
2.1 Standards for Context Identification
A natural response to these observations would be to try to
adapt and update the performance standards currently used for
vehicular safety and reliability. The U.S. Department of
Transportation appeared to endorse this strategy when it
suggested “conducting research to develop and validate new
performance metrics, establishing minimum or maximum
thresholds for those metrics, developing test procedures and test
equipment, and then…incorporate[ing] those metrics,
procedures, and tests in new FMVSS [standards].” [9, p. 68] That
is, the U.S. DOT proposes to use similar types of tests and
metrics as for, say, evaluations of braking performance. Of
course, these AV tests would be more sophisticated, but they
would nonetheless be focused on Go/No Go metrics, fixed
contexts, and acceptable tolerances on performance.
The problem with this approach, as noted by Danks and
London [3], is that these types of performance standards
presuppose that the technology operates within a well-defined
context of operation. Given such a context, performance
standards then typically specify tolerances that must be achieved
for specific functions. In many cases (e.g., engine modules), the
contexts of operation are largely determined by the operations of
other vehicle components.
In other cases, though, a human ensures that the context of
operation is appropriate for the deployment of a vehicle system.
Traditional cruise control systems, for example, require the
driver to continuously ensure that road and traffic conditions are
appropriate for maintaining a fixed speed. Dynamic cruise
control systems are capable of adjusting vehicle speed without
human input, but even they require the driver to ensure that the
current context is appropriate for use, and to thereby initiate the
system and monitor its performance as conditions change.
One key way in which AVs move beyond mere automation
is by assuming the task of identifying relevant contexts of
operation, and then selecting (for the estimated or inferred
context) the function or behavior that will advance appropriate
goals while conforming to relevant norms, constraints, and
desiderata. That is, autonomous systems are designed, almost by
definition, for situations in which we cannot specify the context
a priori and where there is not necessarily a human to do that
context identification. We thus lack a necessary precondition for
the very specification of a performance standard. In short, not
only are there no current performance standards for assessing
the ability of AVs to individuate and identify relevant contexts of
operation, but it is not even clear that such standards are
possible [3].
2.2 Uncertainty and Context Identification
A central challenge to evaluating the safety and reliability
of AVs stems from the uncertainty that currently pervades the
context identification and decision making that they are required
to perform, in at least the following ways:
I. Is the set of contexts of operation for a particular AV a
closed and well-defined set, or is it open-ended?
II. For each possible context of operation, are there features
that can be used to identify or individuate it? And if so,
how reliable are those features?
III. How sensitive are these features to changes likely to
occur within the same environment (e.g., altered driving
or pedestrian behavior, traffic density, etc.)?
IV. Are these key context identification features
environment-specific? How do changes in environment
affect correlations between contexts and features?
V. Are the sensors and other data-input devices capable of
reliably detecting all relevant context-determining
features across all possible environmental conditions?
VI. Given AV perception of a particular context of operation
and desired function, how reliably does its behavior
conform to relevant norms?
VII. If a vehicle misidentifies the context of operation, how
quickly and safely can it correct or otherwise mitigate its
behavior?
This list is not intended to be exhaustive, nor do we suggest
that these questions are insurmountable for AVs (though many
have not yet been answered). But these multiple sources of
uncertainty illustrate the depth of the challenge of articulating
traditional performance standards, as these presuppose that we
have positive answers for all of the questions (see also [8]). Thus,
to the extent that AVs will function outside of clear, well-defined
contexts, current regulatory systems for vehicles are not capable
of providing credible social assurance of AV safety and
reliability.
3 An Alternative Regulatory Approach
At a high level, our scientific, ethical, and epistemic situation
with regards to AVs is very similar to our situation for novel
drugs and other medical interventions. In both cases, we are
dealing with a new technology that provides novel capabilities,
but only as part of a complex, non-stationary environment,
where we do not know exactly when or why the technology
works, or all of the environmental, user, or system factors that
make a substantive causal difference. Of course, there are also
differences between the situations, but these similarities suggest
that the introduction of AVs onto public roadways might be
regulated in a manner analogous to the way that novel medical
interventions are approved for, and introduced into, clinical
practice.
In the biomedical context, clinical translation is the process
of using insights from basic science to develop a novel
therapeutic intervention for a particular medical condition. The
process of translating novel medical interventions from the
bench to the bedside has been described and analyzed in detail
by Kimmelman and London [7]. Our view is that AV
development and deployment from the laboratory and proving
grounds to community roads can be usefully understood as
“roadway translation,” analogous to clinical translation, and
regulated accordingly.
3.1 AV “Ensembles” and Application Spaces
The first step in constructing an alternative approach to
regulating AVs is to better articulate the “unit” of translation. In
particular, we contend that the unit of translation is not any
particular piece of software or hardware, or even a software-
hardware combination. Rather, these are the most visible
elements of a larger “ensemble” of elements that are refined and
developed over the course of translation because they are
believed to be sufficient to achieve a concrete performance target
[7]. Specifically, an AV ensemble includes diverse elements:
Hardware components (including sensor packages,
processing platforms and automotive hardware);
Software systems (including visual recognition, planning
and control algorithms); and
Models and constraints that specify the space of contexts
the vehicle can be expected to identify.
These models and constraints themselves have multiple
elements reflecting the complexity of the situation:
A set of environments in which those contexts must be
identified;
Degree of environmental and contextual variation with
which the system must be expected to cope; and
Behaviors that the AV should be expected to perform, along
with context → behavior mappings.
The task of AV development is then to assemble a
combination of technologies, along with models and constraints
that specify the conditions under which developers believe the
AV will be a safe and reliable technology. The actual real-world
safety and reliability of an AV ensemble thus depends partly on:
the likelihood that the vehicle will only be deployed within
relevant limits; whether the model and constraints adequately
capture real-world operational demands; and the ability of the
various systems to safely and reliably perform those tasks under
real-world conditions.
To better understand the non-hardware, non-software
elements of an AV ensemble, consider first a delivery truck that
is developed only to convey packages from a central distribution
point (such as an airport or freight terminal) to a limited number
of ancillary distribution points via controlled roadways. In this
case, the AV ensemble includes limits on contexts of operation,
such as the limited number of possible routes for the vehicle, and
constraints that are assumed for those routes, such as the nature
and kind of obstacles and traffic it might encounter.
Suppose instead that the exact same delivery truck (in terms
of hardware and software) is developed with the goal of taking
packages from a central distribution point to an arbitrary address
within a single city. The hardware and software package are
now part of a different AV ensemble, precisely because the
system is expected to deal with a wider set of contexts with
increased variability both within and across contexts. Moreover,
the models and constraints used to specify the set of
environments in which the AV is expected to operate safely, and
the universe of tasks it is capable of performing, must be
correspondingly richer.
This characterization of an AV ensemble makes explicit
what diligent developers already know: successful design
requires matching system capabilities with the task and
environmental demands for intended use-cases, including plans
for unexpected contingencies, and explicit specification of what
counts as success in various situations. As most developers
recognize, sometimes we alter technological aspects of the
vehicle (software or hardware), but sometimes we alter the AV
ensemble by expanding or adjusting the deployment space. This
latter approach is not available with traditional vehicles, as they
have a well-defined deployment space. Any successful
regulatory or oversight system for AVs must thus take a broader
view of the unit of translation: the safety and reliability of AV
ensembles needs to be evaluated whenever changes are made to
any feature of the AV ensemble, not just obvious changes in
hardware (e.g., new sensor array) or software (e.g., new code).
We thus require a staged process of testing and rollout into
different deployment spaces, coupled with ongoing review.
3.2 Early-phase Testing
Regulation of a particular AV ensemble should begin with early-
phase testing. This stage is exploratory in nature and includes
simulation studies in virtual environments, as well as detailed
testing of the full (though presumably constrained) AV ensemble
in carefully controlled physical environments. Its primary goal is
to refine the AV ensemble to locate the combination of elements
whose safety and reliability will be evaluated in later-phase
testing, and to identify potential failure points. A central part of
this refinement process is exploration of the application and
deployment space. Because operational contexts cannot be fully
specified in advance, early-phase testing should aim to survey
plausible contexts of operation so that we have a positive
characterization of windows within which the AV can be used
and outside of which failure is more likely. Empirical testing is
critical in this step; we should not presuppose that developers
can specify contexts a priori. Moreover, developers may well
need to update their understandings of the space of contexts of
AV application in the course of exploring the possibilities.
For example, a delivery truck that is expected to travel to
only a few destinations will still have to respond to changes in
the context of operation such as road closures or other detours.
The safe operation of such vehicles may require that either they
be capable of navigating arbitrary routes to the same destination,
or their acceptable contexts of use may need to be
correspondingly restricted.
As the exploration of the scope of application uncovers
additional relevant contexts of operation, developers can assess
the ability of AVs to identify those contexts and respond with
appropriate functions. The use of controlled contexts enables
developers to alter conditions systematically to challenge AV
systems and identify points of failure, or windows outside of
which AV performance begins to degrade. Identification of
failure points and windows of reliable functioning is critical to
refining all components of AV ensembles. It is also essential to
ensuring that AVs are capable of functioning safely and reliably
under the less strenuous conditions of routine deployment.
A goal of early-phase testing should be the development of
AV system models that codify conditions under which the
system has been tested. Those models can then provide
predictions about which environmental or contextual variations
are likely to degrade or breakdown system performance, and
when it will function reliably. Through iterated simulation and
controlled testing, these models and constraints can be tested
and refined.
An additional deployment goal for real-world settings is
estimation of the extent to which vehicles encounter situations
that are expected or unexpected relative to the models and
constraints used to predict their performance. Unexpected events
will likely be correlated with system failures. As changes are
made to avert such failures, we will need to continue to recreate
a range of situations (including failure cases) so that the system
performance in permutations of such situations can be assessed.
Before an AV system can be introduced into real-world
contexts, it should be possible to provide regulators with
compendious information about each of the elements in the AV
ensemble. Regulators obviously must know the hardware and
software, but they also must be informed about the models and
constraints that guided system development, and now ground
performance expectations.
3.3 Transitional Testing
Once developers believe they have refined an AV ensemble to
the point that it is capable of identifying and responding to
anticipated contexts of operation, then testing should move into
carefully monitored deployment in real-world settings. Initially,
the goal of this stage of testing is to gain real-world experience
with an AV ensemble so that we can assess its performance at
identifying and responding to contexts of operation that were
anticipated in the models and constraints that both guided the
AV’s development and also shape expectations about reliability
under broad, real-world conditions.
At the same time, real-world settings are likely to be more
complex, more variable, and contain other unanticipated
features, so testing AV ensembles in such settings will enable
developers to uncover additional, unanticipated contexts of
operation and also refine the AV elements. Throughout, AV
performance must be carefully monitored and controlled since
we initially lack real-world experience. It should also begin with
“ideal” conditions and then move into more difficult scenarios,
progressively challenging AVs with more complexity, noise, and
novelty.
This transitional testing is importantly not simply “deploy
the AV on public roads and record what happens,” just as drugs
do not move immediately from early-phase testing to widespread
prescription and monitoring. Rather, transitional testing involves
careful design of test activities to specifically examine
performance in particular contexts or conditions. For our
regulatory structure, claims such as “this AV has operated
accident-free for two million miles” are relatively uninformative,
as they provide no details about the contexts or deployment
spaces in which those miles have occurred (see also Cummings,
2017). Of course, such measures are not completely
uninformative, as the AV likely did encounter several different
contexts across that many miles. But regulatory purposes require
performance evidence across a range of contexts and situations,
and that requires careful thought and design to ensure that the
AV ends up in those positions.
When AV ensembles are designed to operate in highly
controlled spaces of application, it may be easier to discover the
full range of contexts of operation that the AV will subsequently
encounter during normal operation. As expected deployment
spaces become more open-ended, it becomes correspondingly
more difficult to anticipate novel contexts of operation. As a
result, greater weight will have to be placed on the probability
that the models and constraints that guided system development,
and that ground predictions of its reliability, are adequate to
capture the demands of real-world environments. The key is to
provide reasonable public assurance that AVs identify and
reliably function in contexts of operation that can plausibly be
anticipated to arise.
This period of transitional testing ends when developers
believe, and the oversight agency agrees, that their AV ensemble
has been sufficiently refined that it is capable of operating
independently in the designated space of application. This
regulatory decision-making will obviously be quite tricky in
certain cases, but does not pose a new type of challenge for a
regulatory entity. Rather, it can be addressed using processes
similar to those already used by various agencies to set criteria
and thresholds (e.g., deliberation, public comment, and so forth).
3.4 Confirmatory Testing
The goal of confirmatory testing is to gather data on AV
ensemble performance under closely monitored, real-world
conditions with two goals. First, we aim to validate the
hypothesis that the AV ensemble is capable of detecting and
responding to the range of contexts of operation for the specified
space of application. Second, we aim to quantify the reliability of
the AV ensemble’s performance in uncontrolled conditions over
an adequate period of time.
Initially, confirmatory testing should be conducted under
the supervision of trained engineers, where interventions into
the AV operation are logged and examined to determine the
source of problematic behavior. Adjustments can then be made
to address the issue. Further transitional or confirmatory testing
will often be required to validate the efficacy of those AV
ensemble changes.
In many ways, confirmatory testing is analogous to the
prescription-and-monitoring stage of drug development. In the
latter case, drugs are prescribed only by specially trained
individuals (doctors) who are educated in the risks, benefits, and
appropriate contexts for those interventions. Moreover, follow-
up monitoring of a drug typically occurs for many years after it
is first approved for prescription (for particular conditions),
precisely to track whether unexpected symptoms or side effects
occur once the drugs are used in a wider variety of contexts.
Similarly, this confirmatory testing for AV ensembles will
provide engineers and the oversight/regulatory entity with
information about real-world performance in less-controlled
settings. Just as this type of information must be provided by
drug manufacturers even after initial approval, it is critical that
the regulatory entity for AVs have access to this type of
performance data for the whole ensemble (not just the
technology). Traditional vehicle regulation does not need to
know how the vehicle passes the test, only that it successfully
meets the performance requirements. In contrast, AV regulation,
whether in the form of certification or licensing, must be based
on more fine-grained information about the performance of the
whole ensemble (software-hardware technology, plus models
and constraints that ground projections of reliability in different
contexts of operation), analogous to the fine-grained information
required by drug approval agencies.
3.5 Regulatory Entity
Throughout this section, we have repeatedly referred to some
unspecified “oversight or regulatory agency.” The alternative
regulatory paradigm we describe here would require an entity
analogous to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to control
access to consumer markets and to ensure safety and reliability.
This regulatory entity (RE) would need to be empowered to (a)
restrict the deployment and sale of AVs until evidentiary
benchmarks for safety and reliability can be demonstrated; (b)
monitor post-approval performance information; and (c) require
modifications to approved AVs.
To discharge its mandate, the RE would require the ability
to compel disclosure of all data relating to an AV ensemble from
all stages of design, development, and testing. Because these data
will undoubtedly include information about proprietary systems,
the RE would need mechanisms to assure confidentiality of such
information.
Working with relevant stakeholders, including transparent
processes of public engagement, the RE would also be tasked to
articulate context-sensitive benchmarks for safety and reliability
that will provide initial thresholds for market approval. For
example, these may first take the form of population-level
achievements, such as a certain number of driving-hours in
various contexts without human intervention or tolerable
accident rates. Of course, approval would be restricted to those
contexts in which the AV ensemble achieved those benchmarks.
Over time, the RE will presumably build significant
expertise about relevant contextual dimensions, challenging
situations, and so forth. This information could readily be passed
back into the testing processes for AV ensembles. Ideally, this
process could lead to the creation of regulator-designed
simulation environments and real-world tests that can be shared.
The long-run upshot would be the development of significant
expertise in a “trusted partner” that is not itself in the industry.
4 Pros, Cons, and Realism
This regulatory system is clearly more complex than we
typically find for vehicles, which carries significant benefits,
drawbacks, and complications. The most obvious benefit is, of
course, increased confidence that public safety would be
improved through the use of AVs. A number of different positive
benefits of AVs have been proposed [1, 4], but we do not yet
have the relevant real-world data to judge those claims.
A related benefit would be increased trust in the AV
ensembles themselves, whether by users or the public that shares
the roadways with them. In general, the introduction of
autonomous capabilities into a system makes it harder to
develop trust in that system [11], and this problem is
exacerbated in the case of AVs. Lack of trust is a key driver of
non-adoption of a technology [5, 10], and the benefits of AVs
obviously cannot be realized if they either are not used, or are
highly legally constrained because of lack of public trust. The
regulatory system that we propose here would ensure the
disclosureat least, to relevant representatives of the public
interestof exactly the types of information (roughly, why an
AV performs as it does) that are required for the development of
the requisite types of trust [11].
The previous benefit also indirectly supports AV
developers, as it increases the likelihood that their systems
would (if successful) be widely adopted. It rewards AV
developers who create high-quality, reliable products by
excluding (from the market) developers who sell similar
“looking” systems that are unable to perform adequately. Lower
cost products would potentially capture greater market share
because of their attractive price, but also endanger the market as
a whole since higher rates of accidents or fatalities may breed
distrust of the entire AV market, rather than being limited to a
few bad apples.
Finally, the information acquired by the RE could, due to its
status as a trusted partner, significantly advance the state of the
art in AV development. Exchange of information between AV
developers would presumably benefit all, but such exchanges are
highly improbable for competitive reasons. An independent,
trusted RE could facilitate information dissemination and
transmission among the various AV developers.
Of course, our proposed RE achieves these benefits at the
cost of being more invasive than current vehicular regulatory
agencies (e.g., the U.S. DOT). Increased testing and disclosure
requirements would likely slow some development. At the same
time, we frequently decide as a society that such tradeoffs are
worthwhile. For example, standards for the marketing and sale
of drugs are high because of the high costssquandered
financial resources and human healthof allowing firms to sell
ineffective or harmful interventions. Moreover, because of the
complexity of medical technology, we cannot simply inform
consumers and trust that they will make an optimal decision.
AVs and drugs are not like cell phones, where unreliability can
be punished in the marketplace, since the consequences of AV
failure are likely to be more significant (but less predictable by
consumers) in terms of injury and death. As a result, the
marginal costs in speed of development are likely more-than-
outweighed by the benefits of this proposed regulatory system.
A second concern is an ethical one: this type of dynamic,
staged regulatory system inevitably involves a certain amount of
discovery through testing on the public. Moreover, unlike
clinical drug trials where participants can provide informed
consent, the use of AVs on public roadways will potentially
affect many individuals who never gave such consent [2]. While
early-phase and transitional testing can provide clarity about the
performance contexts and characteristics of an AV ensemble, we
will never have complete information. After all, the whole point
of the confirmatory testing phase is exactly that we expect real-
world deployment to involve contexts and conditions for which
we do not have relevant performance data. But as a result, this
phase necessarily includes an element of continued testing, now
on a public (e.g., other drivers) who did not explicitly consent to
participation in this particular “experiment.”
We agree that this is a legitimate ethical concern, but we
also suggest that our proposed regulatory system somewhat
mitigates it, and that it is certainly superior to current systems.
Our proposed RE would have explicit regulatory and monitoring
authority, and so would be able to intervene on the public’s
behalf if the real-world “experiment” goes awry in some way.
Our previous arguments imply that some degree of real-world
testing and learning must occur; we cannot do everything in the
laboratory. The ethically best response is to embrace this fact
and design our regulatory systems to ensure that, for example,
the “experiments” can be adjusted or halted in a timely fashion if
necessary, as our proposed RE would be able to intervene.
We have largely sidestepped issues of political feasibility
here. We expect that there would likely be significant barriers to
establishing such an RE, as expected benefits are diffused across
a large number of people, while the expected costs are localized
on a small group (i.e., the AV ensemble developers). Moreover,
there would be natural worries about regulatory capture in such
an RE. Nonetheless, we believe that this “first principles”
analysis of the regulatory system that we ought to prefer
provides a relatively concrete target for future debates and
discussions.
4 Conclusions
AVs are rapidly spreading, and debates about how best to
regulate them currently lag far beyond the technology. Current
regulatory systems and agencies for vehicles depend on clear
benchmarks for well-defined contexts. Autonomous systems are
valuable, however, precisely when the contexts are vague or
underspecified, or where it is not necessarily clear what counts
as “success.” We thus must shift our understanding of how to
regulate these systems. The introduction of autonomy is not
similar to the introduction of a novel braking system, but instead
is a completely different type of feature.
Rather than focusing solely on the technology, we must
broaden our field to the full AV ensemble by including the
assumptions and preconditions that are known to the
developers, but are typically not publicly discussed or disclosed.
Rather than using Go/No Go criteria, we need a dynamic, staged
system that gradually increases the approved contexts of
application through directed experimentation by informed users.
Rather than blanket approval, we need continued monitoring
and refinement to ensure public safety and trust. In short, we
propose that AV ensemble regulation should resemble the
regulation of drugs and other medical interventions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper was made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie
Corporation of New York. DD is the recipient of an Andrew
Carnegie Fellowship. The statements made and views expressed
are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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... As such, we view our proposal as complementary to what is found in the literature. London and Danks (2018) argue for a regulatory policy for autonomous systems with similar stages as those used for the introduction of medical drugs and other interventions to the general public. ...
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... Moreover, future policies and regulations need to consider the oversight requirements explicitly outlined by the model presented. While a large amount of ethical AI regulation is focused on the external interactions of AI in society, which is important (London and Danks 2018;Cave, Coughlan, and Dihal 2019), the extra dimension of intrateam communication in HATs merits the requirements of additional oversights targeted towards the ethical use of AI teammates. Unfortunately, this regulation may not be as apparent as these systems may not be public facing, but rather internal and team facing. ...
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