The expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems has shown great potential to generate enormous social good while also raising serious ethical and safety concerns. It is therefore important to apply interdisciplinary research methods and tools to comprehensively analyze the social and ethical implications of AI embodied in autonomous vehicles (AVs).
Importantly, AVs will take actions that directly affect human life and societal well-being. Thus, it is imperative to analyze ethical concerns related to AVs to identify at-risk populations, inform policy, and generate hypotheses for future empirical ethics research on AI. Identifying norms and accounting for multiple ethical issues related to AVs will increase public confidence that the diverse values of a pluralistic society can be successfully implemented.
This Special Issue of AI & Society (AI&S) will expand critical scholarly research by introducing and examining the topic of Ethics and AVs. The aim of this special issue is to curate and present state-of-the-art work on this area with broader implications of automation in transportation settings. Topics and themes will include:
- Theoretical considerations: e.g., ethical guidance functions for AVs, wellbeing for riders, models of societal values in the context of transportation, distributive justice concerns regarding driver job loss and displacement.
- Case studies: operationalized policies and reflections on successful and failed implementation attempts of AV technologies in society.
- Risk-based explorations: studies exploring expert and public perceptions of social risks inherent in the implementation of AV freight and passenger vehicles in highway and densely populated environments.
- Methods and approaches: presenting various approaches to researching ethics in reference to AVs from interdisciplinary perspectives.
- Thematic issues: e.g., critical analyses of urban AV implementations; ethical dilemmas of deploying AVs in urban spaces and densely populated environments; identifying use cases and users of AVs; consequences of AVs on urban, suburban and rural life and infrastructures; safety and security with AVs; sustainability and AVs; and so forth.
Editors: Dr. Veljko Dubljević (NC State University), Dr. William Bauer (NC State University), Dr. Munindar Singh (NC State University), and Dr. George List (NC State University).
Important dates:
Abstract submission: 30th August 2025
Manuscript submission: 30th December 2025
Notifications: 28th February 2026
Revised papers due: 30th April 2026
Full information on https://link.springer.com/journal/146/updates/26681120
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Dario Cecchini, Ph.D.
Post Doctoral Research Scholar
NeuroComputational Ethics Research Group
Personal webpage
North Carolina State University,
Department of philosophy and religious studies,
Withers Hall 345
dcecchi@ncsu.edu
+1 (919) 5156106