Self-driving cars

Obviously, and correctly, the first thing you're concerned with is the trolley dilemma. But I think that these two Critical Theory approaches may be more relevant:

• (Marx) Be wary of reification, because it is a perverse power relation between the individual and the system. The individual must be emancipated, and reification blocks this. In the self-driving car situation: such self-driving is a massive reification, which, though in first instance seems wonderful, also insidiously undermines the emancipation of the individual. "How?", you might ask, and being interested mainly in the driving ethics at the moment, and not in the economic and other large scale perverse tendencies of a society with self-driving card. We turn to Habermas:
• (Habermas) Ethics is an open-ended result of discourse. Discourse is, per nature, inclusive, open-ended, and understanding (resp. consensus, sometimes) seeking. However, on discourse, purposive-instrumental theory lives parasitically, and, importantly, flourishes. Purposive-instrumental theory is such that, although initially people gave rise to it for a specific goal, it chooses its goals itself. It is precisely the stuff that disallows re-definition of goals, because it is the recurrence of these goals, itself. What we should be aware of in the case of self-driving cars, is not so much a specific ethics, this way or that, and also not even so much reification as such, but the fact that this reification has a tendency to set its own goals, and disallow interference through discourse. The positive thing about Habermas' theory is that it gives us an approach: namely, we must somehow allow for discourse in the setting of self-driving cars, be it of humans, or cars, or a combination. In the case of humans, we see this discourse in society's shaping of traffic rules and local traffic situations: it is living and happening around us. In the case of the trolley-dilemma, it is the insight that the choice must be one based on discourse, and not instrumentality. Not just for the sake of the results of the choice, but for the possibility of an open-ended ethics discourse. Aspects of this discourse are: being able to blame someone, and by extension, the reasons that this person might have had. [...]