Toward a rational and ethical sociotechnical system of autonomous vehicles: A novel application of multi-criteria decision analysis

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256224
• Publication Date: 2021-08-13T17:25:07Z
• Authors: Veljko Dubljevic; George List; Jovan Milojevich; Nirav Ajmeri; William A. Bauer; Munindar P. Singh; Eleni Bardaka; Thomas A. Birkland; Charles H. W. Edw...; Roger C. Mayer; Ioan Muntean; Thomas M. Powers; Hesham A. Rakha; Vance A. Ricks; M. Shoaib Samandar
• Keywords: Sociotechnical system

The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment the harms benefits their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts assess significance 13 potential eight might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, considered: (1) status quo, i.e., no AVs deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, regulatory control would exercised commercial entities "push" development deployment; (3) regulated introduction, applied either private individuals or fleet operators could own AVs; (4) fleets only, only AVs. Our results suggest two these scenarios, (4), namely privately-owned introduction ownership less likely cause harm than quo options.