Should our transport systems be put under autonomous control?

You leave your house for work, you get in the car, start the engine then sit back to read the paper and drink your coffee whilst your car drives you to work.

It sounds like something from a science fiction film, but the Royal Academy of Engineering believes that fully-automated transport could be on the roads within 10 years.

We're already partly there, with several aspects of car control being removed from the hands of the driver. Volvo, for example, recently unveiled their XC60 "City Safety" program which allows cars to detect how far and how fast they're approaching other vehicles, enabling them to stop themselves without human control to prevent accidents.

Not just that but anti-locking brakes are now becoming more and more common as our cars that can park themselves.

However, if science-fiction has taught us anything, it is that machines will one day rise up against us. With that in mind, debate still rages over the ethical and legal issues over putting our lives into the hands of computer systems.

The question of computer systems with 'self-determination' has been raised over the years, especially within military circles. Whilst we have automated bomb defusing robots and other machines capable of dangerous and mundane work, we also have unmanned drones designed to kill people. Currently, they are still under human control but to remove that element would place the decision to kill and destroy directly with the machine.

The main problem is that currently, 'unmanned drones' cannot fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and 'proportionality', determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage.

Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield has been quoted as saying that, "Robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability."

It is that problem that means we still have human beings in plane cockpits, trains and behind the wheel of transport vehicles. Robots, as of yet, cannot make the instinctive decisions that humans can.

Professors Will Stewart and Chris Elliot of the Royal Academy of Engineering however feel that the next step for transport is the 'driverless roads' - which currently exist at certain airports, including Heathrow.

"Autonomous vehicles will be safer. One of the compelling arguments for them is that the machine cannot have an argument with its wife; it can run 24 hours a day without getting tired. But it is making decisions on its own, " Professor Stewart said.

But what if something does go wrong? Machines aren't infallible. They do break. Who would be responsible in an accident? The car? The 'driver' who wasn't driving? The car maker? It is a legal quagmire that has prevented computer surgeons from replacing humans.

"If a robot surgeon is actually better than a human one, most times you're going to be better off with a robot surgeon," Dr Elliott said to the BBC, "But occasionally it might do something that a human being would never be so stupid as to do.

"All technologies are liable to failure, and autonomous systems will be no exception (which is pertinent to the issue of whether autonomous systems should ever be created without manual override).

"Dealing with the outcomes of such failures will raise legal issues. If a person is killed by an autonomous system - say, an unmanned vehicle - who is responsible for that death? Does the law require that someone be held responsible."

So do Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics need a new addition?

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

And now;

4. A robot better have a legal team on stand-by.

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