Automating Vulnerability

Abstract

Abstract This chapter has two parts. It first examines the significance of cars and an automobile sector that is increasingly feeling-into fatigue and the affective and emotional states of drivers and passengers. It then considers suggestion that public safety and ethical concerns about autonomous vehicles may be solved by equipping cars with feelings. To examine automated empathy in relation to occupants the chapter assesses European policy support for this monitoring under the auspice of safety, ethical questions raised, and data-protection problems regarding the processing of occupant data in relation to questions of identification and third-party access. The second part of this chapter explores how cars would simulate vulnerability to injury through something akin to an autonomic nervous system. This is argued to be classically cybernetic involving goals, self-preservation, regulation, homeostasis, and behaviour. For empathy and emotion interests, this vulnerability is observed to represent an embodied and visceral approach to ethics. The chapter assesses this observation in relation to the infamous trolley problem, in which an onlooker has the choice to save five people in danger of being hit by a vehicle by diverting the moving vehicle to kill one person.