The Dilemma of Robocar Testing...

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Why is it acceptable for the AV industry to conduct tests on non-consenting "human guinea pigs" to supposedly save 40,000 lives a year?

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 18, 2019 – 

To advocates of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, the 40,000 American lives lost each year on our highways is prima facie evidence of the unsuitability of humans at controlling road vehicles. "Grant us unregulated testing of AV tech on public roads," they say to lawmakers, "and we will train AI and deep learning to reduce fatalities to zero."

Based on that promise, unregulated AV testing is a very compelling argument; however, on further reflection, it doesn't sit so well with the highly restrictive testing practices universally adopted in, say, the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Let's consider cancer research as an example.

Cancer claims the lives of more than 600,000 Americans each year [American Cancer Society: Cancer Facts & Figures 2018] yet no adult showing up at the ER with a broken leg or a flesh wound – and in otherwise good health – would experience their M.D. injecting them nolens volens with a trial cancer drug. The argument that "You may die, but think of all the other people who can be saved if we can find a cancer cure in the shortest possible time," is not only abhorrent, but illegal. Why? The Nuremberg Code.

From its entry on Wikipedia, the Nuremberg Code is defined as a set of ethical research principles for human experimentation created as a result of the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War. The ten points of the Nuremberg Code are as follows:

1. Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.
2. The experiment should aim at positive results for society that cannot be procured in some other way.
3. It should be based on previous knowledge (e.g., an expectation derived from animal experiments) that justifies the experiment.
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