Assignment U2 Engineering Ethics Case Study

Assignment U2 – Engineering Ethics Case Study
Case Study Selected
The case study selected for this assignment was the case study #3 autonomous vehicles
Question 1
In designing the self-driving cars, I would choose to design cars that have been programmed to sacrifice the occupant, who is the owner of the vehicle so as to save many lives. After reading the articles provided, it comes out clearly that there is a requisite to save many lives rather than just saving one person in the vehicle. Additionally, it is also important to make such a choice when looking at the number of people you would save. Take for instance ten people are to be sacrificed, for the sake of one person to be saved. Also, according to the research conducted and provided in the articles, public opinion tends to agree with this choice, since most of the people agreed to sacrifice the occupant in their opinions [2]. Therefore, it is crucial to make such a choice because these cars are made to be bought by the public.
This design favors the public who in most cases do not own the vehicles. However, the public has a greater say in the implementation of such a choice since they play a big role in making such decisions. The occupant, who is the owner of the car suffers the consequences of these decisions and is likely to be harmed in case of an accident. This choice is important in ensuring that these vehicles are not resented by the public and thus cause a loss to the manufacturing companies. Therefore, the decisions are necessary for ensuring these companies do not get negative publicity that can cause poor market performance.
Question 2
Uber Company, relies on cars from different manufacturing companies. These companies may include the Toyota and Isuzu cars. These are bought and branded the Uber label company. By introducing the self-driving cars, it means that the company manufacturing the Uber cars will be affected by the need to design more improved cars that are self-driving. This may increase their production costs on the side of the company since they will need to make a new design of the cars. On the other side, Tesla private company manufactures its own electric cars and the decisions to design the self-driving cars will only affect the company and its customers. When designing their cars, they will need to consider the fact that they are electric self-driving cars. They are targeting the people who need electric cars and their design will be quite different from the one used by Isuzu.
Question 3
Unintended consequences arising from Uber’s move to design n...