330 Just ordinAry robots
when the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons hosted
an informal meeting about autonomous killer robots.
e gradual but steadily persistent robotization of trac, too, calls
for timely governmental action and the formation of views on its
future. For robot cars, the comparative assessment between safety and
privacy plays a central role. In several countries, self-driving cars are
being promoted to increase trac safety. Discussing safety in terms
of such a long-term option sounds like a clever maneuver to evoke a
political debate about the use of technical measures that already exist.
A debate should already be taking place on the use and necessity of the
introduction of a system for automatic speed adaptation. e expected
safety gain, meaning the decrease in the number of trac casual-
ties, makes a serious political assessment obligatory. As indicated in
Section 7.2, the core ethic at stake here is the principle of unnecessary
risk (cf. Strawser, 2010). In essence, this concerns the political ques-
tion of whether we, as a society, accept that trac accidents cause
casualties. If we choose to take this view, like the Swedish parliament
in its Vision Zero, we thereby choose to make trac systems optimally
safe by means of the best available (robotics) technologies.
Cooperative driving may begin to play a role in the medium term.
While it will still take years before it is safe enough, it is already high
time that governments, industries, knowledge institutes, and relevant
societal organizations begin talking about the technical and legal
aspects, which deserve attention because of the potential eects of coop-
erative driving, such as system safety and standardization, and liability
if there is a malfunction. Good management of these aspects requires
a lot of time. It is also important to anticipate the gradual introduction
of autonomous cars, and thinking about dierent scenarios in order to
get to grips with the potential radical consequences for public trans-
portation, car ownership, road usage and urban planning, and so on,
is important. e autonomous car also forces regulators to rethink the
relationship between the car and the driver. In the near future, maybe
the car will be obliged to take a driving test. Finally, autonomous cars
will encounter situations in which they have to make life-and-death
choices. Encoding moral decisions into software is a technological and
ethical challenge, but also a political and regulatory one.
In the eld of home robots, societal issues that are raised by sex
robots deserve attention. is concerns ethical and legal questions