The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles: Revisiting a 2020 Paper (Part 1: Legislation, Jobs, and the Mobility Gap)
// original paper //
A few weeks ago I was sitting at a stoplight in my Escape, about eight blocks from my house, and a Waymo rolled up next to me. It took me a second to register what I was looking at. The spinning sensor array on top is the tell. I told the kids to look. They looked. I mentioned there was nobody inside. They said "cool," asked a couple questions, and by the time we got home it was already yesterday's news.
If I had seen Knight Rider's KITT pull up next to me in 1991 I would have lost my mind. By the mid 90s I was dialing into BBSs with my own phone line finding military dialups with telnet and internet access, knowing it would change the world. I was right about the internet. My kids are growing up in a world that keeps changing under their feet. Something that stops me cold at a stoplight barely registers as a blip to them. That's not a bad thing. It just means the baseline keeps moving.
Whatever - in 2020 I wrote a grad school paper on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. I want to revisit it now that a Waymo is driving around my neighborhood.
Introduction
Self-driving cars may have seemed like the future decades ago, but advancements in technology have enabled testing of fully autonomous vehicles. These new vehicles bring many promises of benefits to society. However, designers must examine unintended ethical consequences to these benefits, along with ethical considerations to their implementation. While fully autonomous vehicles are not yet here, there is a great need to plan for the new ethical dilemmas they bring.
Kohl et al. state that current surveys show 56% of people have positive opinions of self-driving cars, while 13.8% have negative concerns, and 29.4% have a neutral opinion, noting a general acceptance of self-driving cars in the public (2017). Their own survey of Twitter data, however, showed 76.4% neutral tweets, with more discussions about the risks than the advantages (Kohl et al., 2017). The public has good reason to question this new technology, as there are still complex ethical questions to answer.
The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) lists five different levels of autonomous driving, with Level 1 implementing driver assistance, Level 2 using partial automation or multiple combined Level 1 systems, Level 3 with conditional automation, Level 4 having high automation, and Level 5 implementing complete automation (Groshen et al., 2018; Faggella, 2020). Most car company executives refer to vehicles above Level 3 as self-driving (Faggella, 2020). Current levels of self-driving vehicles are at Level 2 automation (Kohl et al., 2017). Even at this level, there are ethical complexities.
Well, the SAE levels still matter. They were the right framing in 2020 and they're still the right framing now. When someone says their car "drives itself," the honest question is: at which level? Level 2 is not Level 4. Waymo rolling through my neighborhood is Level 4 (or even 5). My 2009 Escape has cruise control and that's about it - solidly Level 0. Companies are deliberately conflating levels for marketing reasons, and this has caused no small amount of public confusion over the last six years.
The Twitter data point from 2020 holds up in 2026, and then some. AAA's 2025 survey found that interest in full self-driving has actually dropped since 2022, from 18% to 13% (AAA, 2025). The more real it gets, the less people want it. I think people are afraid of losing jobs to the technology. Some are scared of the technology itself, but a lot of people are just annoyed. These things are overly cautious. They stack up and block each other. There are entire Reddit threads of AVs creating gridlock because none of them will blink first. And then there's the Dunning-Kruger: despite what the accident rate evidence actually shows, people believe they personally drive better than the car does. "Clanker" has become a word, not quite a slur yet,* but similar in nature. That's not fear of the technology, that's resentment, which is a different problem.
This played out in my own neighborhood. Right before the pandemic, a developer got run out of my neighborhood because he'd decided that by the time his project was built out, Level 4 and 5 vehicles would be everywhere and nobody would need parking. The neighborhood disagreed, loudly, and wanted the lot designed with plenty of parking spaces. The developer pulled out. The guy came to listen to a neighborhood meeting and didn't get a chance to actually speak and be listened to. He was overrun with heckles and boos. In hindsight, the neighborhood was technically correct (the best kind of correct), not because AVs won't get there, but because assuming they'd be everywhere by 2022 was wrong. But I think they didn't see the forest through the trees. While late, this technology is here now (or will be very quickly). Housing prices still suck. The property that was going to be developed is still abandoned and run down. The amount of parking (1.5 per unit) probably would have been fine anyway.
The paper says "fully autonomous vehicles are not yet here." That was true in 2020. In 2026, I'm watching one idle at a red light in my neighborhood. They're here. What's not here is any meaningful federal legislation around them. That's also a recurring pattern in technology. The technology arrives, the governance doesn't.
This is a theme that runs through a lot of what I studied in grad school. New technology emerges, and the government is either oblivious or unwilling to take a stand. States fill the vacuum with whatever they can get passed, and you end up with a patchwork of laws that businesses have to conform to. It's actually very hurtful to capitalism to not have some of this legislation. Waymo operates in California, Arizona, and Texas (and soon, Colorado). There are (or will be) different rules in every state, different liability frameworks, and different definitions of what even counts as an autonomous vehicle (which is another reason the SAE levels still matter). 29 states have enacted AV laws, but they substantially differ on testing, liability, insurance requirements, and operational standards. Insurance minimums range from $2M (Alabama) to $5M (Connecticut, Vermont), which shows what a patchwork this is (NCSL, 2025). William Gibson said "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." He wasn't wrong. Uneven distribution of this particular technology because of these inconsistent laws (forcing significant compliance overhead on every company operating in the space), along with liability questions that are still unresolved, is exactly the kind of thing that turns cyberpunk from a genre into a documentary.
* On April 27, 2026, Jeopardy! aired a clue identifying "clanker" as a term originating in the Star Wars universe that has gained popularity online as a slur (Davies, 2026).
AAA. (2025). Fear in self-driving vehicles persists. AAA Newsroom. https://newsroom.aaa.com/2025/02/aaa-fear-in-self-driving-vehicles-persists/
Davies, M. (Executive Producer). (2026, April 27). Jeopardy! [TV series episode]. Sony Pictures Television; ABC.
NCSL. (2025). Autonomous vehicles | self-driving vehicles enacted legislation. National Conference of State Legislatures. https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/autonomous-vehicles
Autonomous Vehicle Ethical Pros and Cons
There are many ethical reasons to implement autonomous vehicles. The most important reason for implementation is the high levels of safety they would bring to roadways. Researchers found that at least 90% of traffic accidents are from human error, which self-driving cars could eliminate (Kohl et al., 2017; Fleetwood, 2017). Interconnected autonomous cars could share important information between them, allowing a more efficient distribution with higher number of vehicles moving faster and safer than traditional cars (Coco-Vila, 2017). Fleetwood believes that, with autonomous vehicles, "passengers have access to a level of safety and convenience that is unparalleled in other forms of transportation" (2017). Groshen et al. state that truckers could be safer and more comfortable by automation technologies like Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems, which are equivalent to Level 1 or 2 automation (2018). The act of "platooning," trucks moving in a convoy controlled by a lead truck, also helps with safety and comfort of truck drivers (Groshen et al., 2018).
These safety features of self-driving cars, however, come with the loss of personal control of mobility and privacy. Many recent surveys have shown that while there is a general acceptance of self-driving cars, people may start to dislike the loss of control similar to when cruise control became available (Kohl et al., 2017). Boeglin believes that some will even find it dehumanizing (2015). Boeglin also notes that some vehicles may remove a driver's autonomy of choosing their own route (2015). Enhanced safety may also require sharing details about the car with many different entities (Borenstein et al., 2017; Boeglin, 2015). California currently requires that autonomous vehicles need to store records of the 30 seconds leading up to a crash (Boeglin, 2015).
There are environmental positives from self-driving vehicles, and helping the environment can be an ethical priority. Currently, in the United States, the trucking industry provides 28% of supply chain transportation, but is responsible for 71% of the food supply chain's emissions (Heard et al., 2018). Using automation technologies like platooning can help curb these emissions from reduced aerodynamic drag (Heard et al., 2018). Other autonomous vehicle features like optimal driving cycles, optimal routing and dynamic eco-routing, less idling, reducing cold starts, trip smoothing and harmonization, and lighter vehicles can have significant environmental emission reduction, especially for refrigeration trucks (Heard et al., 2018).
Groshen et al. state that automation will have economic advantages, with new autonomous vehicle related jobs, many with better salaries than those they would displace (2018). They also see other improvements to the economy, stating that consumers will buy more non-transportation goods and services as they spend less on transportation costs and have more free time during travel (Groshen et al., 2018). Heard et al. believe that there may be increased profits in the food distribution industry from cost savings of automation (2018).
Many workers, however, will see a loss of jobs from the automation. Heard et al. call the loss of jobs in the trucking industry a "substantially negative economic effect of autonomous vehicle technology" (2018). They state that in 2016, the heavy and tractor-trailer truck driving industry employed 1.7 million Americans, with autonomous vehicles potentially displacing these workers (Heard et al., 2018). A side effect of this is that rest stops, lodging, and restaurants along the highway system may also suffer, as they depend on truck drivers as customers (Heard et al., 2018). Researchers also see a reduction of many other jobs, including "bus drivers, taxi, and other personal transport employees" and "automobile insurance adjusters, auto repair mechanics, (or) police patrol officers" (Groshen et al., 2018). The public will need to consider how to handle the ethical dilemma of these job losses, with many of these workers needing education and training for transitioning to new autonomous vehicle jobs or other industries.
An ethically moral obligation for implementing autonomous vehicles is the mobility of the disabled. Bradshaw-Martin & Easton state that many disabled feel "inequalities in access to independent mobility" for their inability to drive current cars, and that a major ethical problem exists in excluding the disabled from having this mobility (2014). They argue that cars should have design requirements so that everyone can use them, including those with even ailments like blindness or Alzheimer's disease, and any exclusion arbitrarily and unnecessarily creates an injustice (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014).
An ingenious design in automation can help the disabled gain this mobility back. A brilliant example of this is Ralph Teetor, a blind inventor, who, at a young age, learned to drive a car with the guidance of an overhead line (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014). Ralph Teetor went on to become the creator of cruise control, one of the first steps in vehicle automation (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014). Currently, many manufacturers do not include the disabled in car design decisions because they see them as a "costly afterthought" and do not yet perceive them as a viable market (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014). Steven Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, also believes that "society needs to accept the automation before accepting disabled drivers" (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014).
There should be ethical considerations for teaching and implementing features for aging drivers, too. Yang & Coughlin state that older drivers are less likely to learn these new autonomous vehicle systems as fast as a younger digital generation does (2014). However, older drivers are not reluctant to use these new systems once shown the benefits, though they do take longer to learn them (Yang & Coughlin, 2014). Other considerations for teaching the new technology to aging drivers include systematic differences between drivers as a function of age, generational effects like progressive motorization and gender differences, the changing lifestyles of the elderly, and age-related afflictions of chronic and acute diseases (Yang & Coughlin, 2014). Designers could implement self-driving cars with technologies to assist the elderly with features like advanced navigation systems for aging drivers or in-vehicle health monitoring systems (Yang & Coughlin, 2014).
There are legal and liability concerns with developing autonomous vehicles as well. The technology must be "accepted by the public as unproblematic," which requires a good liability legal framework (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014). Bradshaw-Martin & Easton argue that manufacturers could have integrated current cruise control systems, which include anti-lock brakes, stability control systems, and navigation aids, into autonomous vehicles as early as the late 1990s, but held off development because of legal and liability concerns (2014). The Vienna Convention, with over 70 ratifications, and the Geneva Convention, which the United States and United Kingdom follow, both state that a driver must be able to control the vehicle, excluding partially sighted or other types of disabled people from being able to use a fully automated car (Bradshaw-Martin & Easton, 2014). Bradshaw-Martin & Easton believe that there are ethical reasons to update these treaties (2014).
There are questions regarding who is liable for vehicles in accident situations. In examining if a self-driving vehicle is responsible for its accidents, Gless et al. state that autonomous vehicles do not meet the requirements of personhood (2016). United States law places responsibility on the "managerial agent with supervisory responsibility of the subject," and German law is likely unable to blame the vehicle, as it cannot recognize and evaluate its past actions with a moral reference system (Gless et al., 2016). Current German and United States liability laws do have previous cases for guidance on programming a machine for harm or simple negligence in its design, but note that intelligent agents like an autonomous vehicle push these laws to their limits, and questions remain on when a human must take over a self-driving vehicle (Gless et al., 2016).
Ninety percent of accidents are caused by human error (just Google it, dozens of articles cite this stat, and the sourcing looks reasonable across the board). That number gets disputed constantly, and the pushback is almost never about the methodology. Nobody actually believes they are part of the 90%, everyone thinks they're a good driver... but that's the Dunning-Kruger showing up again, this time applied to the very population causing the problem.
The privacy tradeoffs are real and mostly underreported, but who cares at this point? Our privacy is pretty much gone. That's a big mental health problem for Gen Z, who are often afraid to go out and try new things because they might be recorded and cringe. A Yahoo/YouGov study found that more than half of Gen Z adults have avoided expressing themselves out of fear of being perceived as cringe, and 62% report concerns about exposing personal content online (YPulse, 2026). The environmental case is solid, especially for trucking. Platooning reducing aerodynamic drag is not a small thing at fleet scale, but both of these feel like secondary arguments next to what's actually at stake.
The paper focuses on 1.7 million truckers, which is the right number to anchor the jobs conversation in 2020. But in 2026, the gig economy has become its own category of displacement risk that the paper doesn't fully account for. Uber and Lyft drivers, taxi drivers, Amazon delivery drivers will all be affected. Eventually, mail carriers. Uber alone had 8.8 million active drivers globally as of 2025 (UCLA Anderson Review, 2025). Broader estimates put total U.S. driving job displacement at more than 4 million, a number calculated before the gig economy reached its current scale (Global Policy Solutions, 2017). These are not high-skill roles that map cleanly onto "retraining for autonomous vehicle industry positions." You cannot easily retrain a 55-year-old trucker to be a software engineer (or AI prompter these days), and the idea that there will be some orderly pipeline from displaced driver to AV fleet technician is wishful thinking at best. Look at what happened to miners. What's actually going to happen is that lower-income workers who rely on gig work as a last resort lose that last resort, and there is no federal plan for what comes next.
My professor flagged "ethically moral obligation" in the original paper. Her note: moral obligations are personal, ethical ones involve systematic frameworks. She was right, I was sloppy with it.
The Teetor section got marked "very interesting point" by the same professor, and she was right. A blind inventor creating cruise control recontextualizes the entire history of vehicle automation. The accessibility argument is the strongest moral case for AVs and the least discussed...
My wife had hip surgery last year and couldn't drive for months. That's temporary and recoverable, and we had resources to work around it, but think about someone with a permanent mobility limitation. What about a single parent who works and physically cannot shuttle kids around because there is no one else to do it? The numbers back this up: 18.6 million Americans have travel-limiting disabilities, and those ages 18-64 with travel-limiting disabilities are 9.4 percentage points more likely to live in a zero-vehicle household than those without (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, n.d.). 16 million Americans have no access to a personal vehicle at all, and nearly 104 million can't reliably use one, including people with disabilities, people in poverty, teenagers, and the elderly (NRDC, 2025). Bradshaw-Martin and Easton's "inequalities in access to independent mobility" reads as an academic abstraction until it isn't.
And yet manufacturers treat the disabled as a "costly afterthought." That's not cynicism, it's capitalist market logic. The AAA data shows consumers primarily want safety features that protect themselves (more on this in future parts, too) - emergency braking, collision detection, features that benefit the person buying the car. Designing for a disabled population doesn't move units the same way. The market will not solve this on its own, which means it requires legislation, and we've already covered how great and efficient our government is, especially with new technology.
And regarding liability; nobody is clearly on the hook under any established legal framework, which means it gets decided case by case in civil court while the industry hopes the right precedents emerge. Oh look, another "the government is failing us with new technology regulation" situation.
And before anyone says the answer is public transportation - well, no shit, but that's a different argument in a car-based society. It doesn't help every person without access to a car unless you can get a dial-a-ride to every one of their houses quickly and efficiently. You can't. AVs can.
Bureau of Transportation Statistics. (n.d.). Travel patterns of American adults with disabilities. U.S. Department of Transportation. https://www.bts.gov/travel-patterns-with-disabilities
Global Policy Solutions. (2017). Stick shift: Autonomous vehicles, driving jobs, and the future of work. http://globalpolicysolutions.org/report/stick-shift-autonomous-vehicles-driving-jobs-and-the-future-of-work/
Natural Resources Defense Council. (2025). Who doesn't have a car? https://www.nrdc.org/resources/who-doesnt-have-car
UCLA Anderson Review. (2025). Uber's conundrum: Retaining drivers as it builds an autonomous fleet to replace them. UCLA Anderson School of Management. https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/ubers-conundrum-retaining-drivers-as-it-builds-an-autonomous-fleet-to-replace-them/
YPulse. (2026, April 13). Gen Z's fear of cringe is holding them back from being themselves. https://www.ypulse.com/newsfeed/2026/04/13/gen-zs-fear-of-cringe-is-holding-them-back-from-being-themselves/
References
Boeglin, J. (2015). The costs of self-driving cars: Reconciling freedom and privacy with tort liability in autonomous vehicle regulation. Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 17(1).
Borenstein, J., Herkert, J. R., & Miller, K. W. (2017). Self-driving cars and engineering ethics: The need for a system level analysis. Science and Engineering Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-0006-0
Bradshaw-Martin, H., & Easton, C. (2014). Autonomous or 'driverless' cars and disability: A legal and ethical analysis. Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, 20(3).
Coca-Vila, I. (2017). Self-driving cars in dilemmatic situations: An approach based on the theory of justification in criminal law. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 12(1), 59-82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-017-9411-3
Faggella, D. (2020). The self-driving car timeline: Predictions from the top 11 global automakers. Emerj. https://emerj.com/ai-adoption-timelines/self-driving-car-timeline-themselves-top-11-automakers/
Fleetwood, J. (2017). Public health, ethics, and autonomous vehicles. American Journal of Public Health, 107(4), 532-537. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2016.303628
Gless, S., Silverman, E., & Weigend, T. (2016). If robots cause harm, who is to blame? Self-driving cars and criminal liability. New Criminal Law Review, 19(3), 412-436. https://doi.org/10.1525/nclr.2016.19.3.412
Groshen, E. L., Helper, S., MacDuffie, J. P., & Carson, C. (2018). Preparing U.S. workers and employers for an autonomous vehicle future. https://doi.org/10.17848/tr19-036
Heard, B. R., Taiebat, M., Xu, M., & Miller, S. A. (2018). Sustainability implications of connected and autonomous vehicles for the food supply chain. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 128, 22-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.021
Kohl, C., Mostafa, D., Böhm, M., & Krcmar, H. (2017). Disruption of individual mobility ahead? A longitudinal study of risk and benefit perceptions of self-driving cars on Twitter.
Yang, J., & Coughlin, J. F. (2014). In-vehicle technology for self-driving cars: Advantages and challenges for aging drivers. International Journal of Automotive Technology, 15(2), 333-340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12239-014-0034-6