Autocorrect: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics and the Driverless Car

The “trolley problem” remains a useful exercise in drawing out the differences between utilitarian and deontological approaches to ethics in analytic philosophy. However, the thought experiment also determined imagining what AI-infused artefacts should be capable of, suggesting that ethical decision-making becomes a data-driven enterprise rather than a human, social, or individualised practice. Maya Indira Ganesh tracks the language, materiality, and culture of epistemic tools that establish safety and automobility as problems to be solved by the driverless car, examining outputs of AI systems versus what constitutes our social and technological presents and futures.