Sintesi di posizioni su Politico.eu <http://www.politico.eu/article/should-a-driverless-car-kill-the-kid-or-the-r...> [] Ethics and morals are intrinsically fuzzy — no amount of rapid calculations can give them the clarity of mathematics. And if drivers, or the manufacturer (and the engineers and ethicists employed by them), are able to program the car’s ethics, this changes the degree of intention of any resulting deaths, and also its legal status. In cultures that revere the elderly, the car would aim for the child, while in the West, which prizes youth, the car would hit the grandmother. “We mean for that to happen. This premeditation is the difference between manslaughter and murder, a much more serious offense,” wrote <https://www.wired.com/2014/08/heres-a-terrible-idea-robot-cars-with-adjustab...> Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. “Ethical dilemmas are likely not resolvable in a way that everybody agrees with. That’s why they’re dilemmas, exactly because there’s no clear consensus and that there’s good reasons that support different answers,” he told POLITICO in email exchange. A car buyer of the future may have to decide the ethical makeup of the vehicle, and in some way share the resulting responsibility for the choices that car makes in the event of an accident. In his speech, Ford called for all driverless cars to be installed with standardized ethical technology, but that doesn’t solve the problem of just what morals should be imbued in the machine. [] Should the moral algorithm built into connected and self-driving cars be based on Western philosophical tradition, or maybe Eastern, or yet another? If so, then Ford’s conundrum might have a different answer. In cultures that revere the elderly, the car would aim for the child, while in the West, which prizes youth, the car would hit the grandmother. On a higher philosophical level the implications are even more important, especially for the Western way of thinking, which prizes the individual and freedom of will. What’s new with driverless cars, when the algorithm is fully in charge, is that “the individual becomes irrelevant, that the community and especially the calculation prevail,” said Paolo Bottazzini, a former lecturer at Milan’s Politecnico University and author of several books on algorithms. “I am not sure we Europeans are fully aware that with driverless cars what’s at stake is our way of thinking,” he said. Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and Pulitzer prize winner, was far more blunt. He told us he finds the idea of driverless cars “repugnant, and I absolutely cannot understand why so many people think it’s great.”