西溪逻辑论坛第113期
Date: 6 May 2019 (14:00-16:00)
Venue: Room 259, Main Teaching Building, Xixi Campus, Zhejiang University
Speaker: Prof. Piotr Kulicki (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin)
Title: Towards Deontic Logic for Autonomous Cars

Abstract:
Autonomous cars are one of the emerging technologies that will have a signi can’t impact on society in the upcoming years. Although the predictions estimate that the traffic safety will be signi cantly improved, many people are afraid and prefer a human driver’s control over vehicles or at least human driver’s possibility to take control over the car. One of the reasons is that people want to be sure that in case of hazardous situation or accident a self-driving car will behave in a proper way. What does it mean “proper way”? There are several levels that can be considered, but at the end there is a level of values, especially moral values. In the paper we move towards a formal ethics for autonomous vehicles, which will allow people to understand the values in uencing a self-driving car. To accomplish this we address philosophical concerns for the possibility of ethics for driverless cars, by paying particular attention to issue of their capacity as a normative agent. Moreover, we discuss a formal ontology for these vehicles and the possibility of the use of such ontology as a basis of a normative system. The lack of expressive power of ontological tools leads to the conclusion that the formal ethics for autonomous cars requires more powerful logic. The logic should be able to take into account norms on actions and states, and handle normative conflict and preferences on norms. We will present one simple logic that fulfils some of the constraints.

Reading materials: (1) Paper 1 (2) Paper 2

(Supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities)