The ethics of travel: balancing safety, sustainability, and personal autonomy

Transport is key to modern life: we travel for work, move resources and products from A to B, visit family and friends near and far, and go on holidays abroad. Computing has the potential to improve transport efficiency and safety, but it comes with significant risks. This article considers some of the key areas where ethics, technology and transportation collide.

Liability

With increasing instances of AI assisting humans in the air, on the ground and at sea, the question of liability is ever more complex. Though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that computer controlled systems are safer and more reliable, the sometimes-controversial history of autonomous vehicles and digital controls is peppered with examples of fly-by-wire systems implicated in air crashes, and there is an increasing number of sea and road-based accidents involving computer-controlled vehicles.

When made by a human, blame for a mistake can be easily attributed to one person — when control is handed over to a digital system, complex decisions have to be made about where liability lies. Was due care taken in the design of the system? The testing? In its implementation? And there is also the ethical decision of the extent to which humans should choose — or be forced — to cede control to computers.

Monitoring and optimising

Considering how much energy is currently provided by oil, diesel and gas, the transition to electric vehicles will put immense pressure on already over-stretched energy grids. Systems such as smart charging, where vehicles are charged flexibly to align with the user’s needs, and smart storage, which enables vehicles to push spare energy back into the grid when demand rises, aim to optimise availability whilst reducing peak demand. Monitoring and optimising also presents the opportunity for smart cities to enhance transportation across regions by improving efficiency, reducing pollution, saving time by monitoring live traffic, and modelling and predicting need. Automation can also save individuals time — for example, vehicles can interact in order to optimise fuel efficiency by travelling in sync and close together to reduce drag. Used appropriately, these systems offer the potential for more sustainable transport systems that optimise resources.

However, one problem all these systems share is that they involve huge amounts of data collection and have the potential to monitor individuals — for example, smart charging may mean your behaviour is monitored and analysed in ways you did not intend or approve. This raises significant questions about privacy and creates opportunities for the misuse of data, by the state or by bad actors, as well as raising questions around personal choice versus the collective good.

AI and quantum technologies can create systems most people can use but not understand, and the complexity and opacity of such systems should be balanced by robust legal protections. To make the most of the opportunities automation offers, we need reliable and well understood systems that people are willing and able to use; appropriate safeguards and well designed systems are needed to ensure public trust.

Ethics

Personal choice and freedom are key ethical questions when it comes to implementing computer controlled systems; for example, the potential for integrating options for different forms of transport into computer mediated taxi services to simplify travel. 

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To what extent should technology enable or discourage some forms of travel over others? To what extent should it enable or discourage travel as a whole? Immersive technologies have the potential to transport someone across the world without needing to physically travel, thus reducing the associated pollution and energy consumption — so, whether to travel physically, or experience or attend things virtually becomes an ethical dilemma.

The risks of AI bias also make implementing it an ethical dilemma in other areas; for example, logistics is another field where computing could have huge benefits for efficiency and managing provision of goods and services. However, an AI solution with biased data could ostracise areas or groups of people, reinforcing existing bias. Careful consideration of ethical design and implementation is needed to ensure these problems can be addressed.

Security and ethics

Security concerns also arise in these systems. Moving key infrastructure control to cloud services creates questions around service provision, personal safety and even national security and independence. Whilst legal frameworks around data protection exist across different countries, the actual location of your data — and who has access — is another area where there are tensions between technology, responsibility and choice.

For transportation systems, having cloud services to manage traffic control, monitor systems, and even respond to accidents and emergencies means that key elements of a national infrastructure are put on servers where data access and availability go beyond normal jurisdiction. This is another area where we have to rely on ethical decision making in determining what we place in the cloud, and even on whose cloud services. Recent studies have also revealed the increasing potential for hacking and attacking of vehicle control systems that comes with increasing computer assistance and the integration of network and internet connectivity. Professional design and ethical implementation and use of these features is once again essential to avoid these issues.

Quantum computing also carries risk, with the potential to undermine existing security systems by breaking existing encryption, amplifying the security problems present for classical computing. But as we face these new challenges, there are new opportunities and options that can be developed to utilise the benefits and ensure they outnumber the challenges.

Conclusion

The role of established and emerging IT technologies in creating a safe and sustainable transport system is vital. Those in control of procuring, developing, supporting and using new systems must make ethically informed decisions, balancing benefits and risks (and minimising the latter). They must ensure that new systems are genuinely beneficial, reducing more problems than they cause, and there is a need for suitable privacy regulations to ensure fairness and balance in systems, especially those that rely on AI. As highlighted in the 2023 Ethics Group report, there is a need for professional duty and care in designing, implementing and using such systems.

Intelligent transportation has the potential to make city transit simpler, more lucrative, and safer by utilising new and upcoming technology. It is not a futuristic notion; it is actively being implemented in multiple cities, and its triumphs and failures are being used to develop systems in other areas. It attempts to make smart transportation easier to manage. The internet, cloud computing, wireless communication, location-based services, and electronic gadgets all work together to make travel more sustainable and efficient; it’s up to us to make sure it’s also ethical.