Risk Assessment of Autonomous Driving: Integrating Technical Failures, Ethical Dilemmas, and Policy Frameworks
For policymakers and engineers, it highlights the interconnectedness of technical, ethical, and regulatory challenges in autonomous driving, but the analysis is largely descriptive and incremental.
The paper analyzes risks in autonomous driving from technical, ethical, and regulatory perspectives, finding that perception and classification errors dominate technical failures, ethical frameworks vary, and inconsistent regulations increase uncertainty. It recommends an adaptive governance approach combining engineering, ethics, and supervision.
Autonomous driving technology has the potential to reduce the large number of road traffic accidents caused by human error each year, but it also brings new types of risks that need to be evaluated from the aspects of technology, ethics and regulations. Based on public crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), disengagement reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the MIT Moral Machines dataset, and a comparative regulatory analysis of five jurisdictions, we have found that the main types of technical failure modes are perception and classification errors. These account for a relatively large proportion of the reported accidents, and it can be concluded that there are different ethical frameworks for autonomous vehicle decision-making, and inconsistent regulations in different areas increase the uncertainty of widespread application. Generally speaking, the problems of technology, ethics and regulation are closely related and need to be solved together. Therefore, this paper recommends a more adaptive and cooperative governance approach that combines engineering standards, ethical discussion, and institutional supervision.