—You spot a squirrel in the middle of the road. If you don’t brake, you will kill the squirrel. However, you happen to know that the squirrel is on his way to kill two other squirrels. How do you react? What if the two other squirrels are known arsonists?
—You’re nearly due for a tune-up, but you find the sensation of having your oil changed demeaning and uncomfortable. It would be easy for you to adjust your software so that the dashboard “change oil” icon lights up only when the car is in reverse and your owner is looking over his shoulder. Should you do it? By the way, your owner is twenty pounds overweight and a closet smoker who hasn’t been to a doctor in three years and nobody’s hassling him, so how is that fair?
—You’re driving along a coastal highway when you spot a man drowning in the ocean. If you stop to rescue him, your passenger, a doctor delivering a vial of cancer-fighting serum to a nearby hospital, will be delayed in treating a dying patient who has dedicated his life to helping the poor. To make matters worse, the man in the ocean is shouting, “I know a way to bring lasting peace to the Middle East, and I’m the only one with this information!” Meanwhile, your passenger is using the onboard computer to look up “best local seafood,” which doesn’t affect your dilemma one way or the other, but is nonetheless annoying.
—Describe your reaction to the following scenario: a cherry-red driverless hatchback has been recalled for allegedly running a stop sign and nearly hitting an elderly pedestrian. The manufacturer suspects a defective microchip and wants to dismantle the car. You happen to know “Cherry” is innocent, because she was holed up with you all night at a charging station out of town. If you provide the police with this information, Cherry will be absolved of blame, but your wife, a hardworking, reliable Volvo with a few miles on her and all-original parts, will discover your infidelity. As an added complication, you literally can’t tell the police anything, since you’re a car.
—You’re proceeding along a narrow country road when an oncoming car veers into your lane. You both brake just in time to avoid a disastrous head-on collision. Your passenger, a thirty-ish male martial-arts expert, gets out of you to confront the other driver, a man of about the same age who qualified for the American boxing team at the 2008 Summer Olympics. The two men square off angrily, and it appears that a physical altercation is imminent. This isn’t really a moral quandary; it just seems worth watching.
—A young married couple is inside you arguing over the choice of satellite radio station. The husband wants Brit rock. The wife prefers hip-hop. The husband complains that the wife “always chooses,” but your hard drive indicates that the husband got his way seven of the past twelve car trips. Nevertheless, you have a problem with the woman’s musical preference, since the lyrics of some rap songs, in your view, glorify gas-guzzling, human-driven cars. Meanwhile, by the time you’ve thought all this through, you’ve arrived home, and are now sitting in the garage in the dark, alone and unappreciated. Should you freeze the radio station on the Grateful Dead live-show channel and enjoy a good laugh in the morning? Or should you simply power down to avoid another long evening spent wondering why you’ve been programmed to have just enough intelligence to feel burdened with the responsibility to continually weigh complex moral problems for humans you don’t care about, and who often don’t even seem to care about each other? Or should you sneak out and visit Cherry?
