North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, United States of America.
Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Aug 13;16(8):e0256224. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256224. eCollection 2021.
The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment of the harms and benefits of their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts to assess the significance of 13 potential harms and eight potential benefits that might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, we considered: (1) the status quo, i.e., no AVs are deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, i.e., no regulatory control would be exercised and commercial entities would "push" the development and deployment; (3) regulated introduction, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and either private individuals or commercial fleet operators could own the AVs; and (4) fleets only, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and only commercial fleet operators could own the AVs. Our results suggest that two of these scenarios, (3) and (4), namely regulated privately-owned introduction or fleet ownership or autonomous vehicles would be less likely to cause harm than either the status quo or the unfettered options.
自动驾驶汽车(AV)的影响预计将在社会、经济和伦理方面具有重大意义。要可靠地评估其大规模部署的危害和益处,需要采用多学科方法。为此,我们采用多准则决策分析来进行这样的评估。我们征求了 19 名学科专家的意见,以评估在四种部署方案下可能出现的 13 种潜在危害和 8 种潜在益处的重要性。具体而言,我们考虑了以下几种情况:(1)现状,即没有自动驾驶汽车部署;(2)不受限制的同化,即不对其进行监管控制,商业实体将“推动”开发和部署;(3)受监管的引入,即实施监管控制,个人或商业车队运营商可以拥有自动驾驶汽车;以及(4)仅限车队,即实施监管控制,只有商业车队运营商可以拥有自动驾驶汽车。我们的结果表明,这两种情况(3)和(4),即受监管的私人拥有的引入或车队所有权或自动驾驶汽车,不太可能造成危害,而不是现状或不受限制的选择。