Dr. Bull and his team returned from vacation to tackle a deadly accident involving a self-driving car. Ejetto, an autonomous vehicle manufacturer, was just weeks away from launching their new car operated by an anthropomorphized program called E.J. One night during a test, an engineer named Adam was run over and killed by the car. Adam’s widow sued Ejetto claiming that the company was negligent and seeking damages that would bankrupt the company. Ejetto claims that Adam was careless, showing up late to work and skipping security protocols, which caused E.J. to malfunction. Dr. Bull takes the case because he believes that Ejetto’s founder is a promising genius with the potential to change the world.
As things unfold, it becomes clear that there has been foul play. Someone had embedded a software compromise into E.J. such that any hacker could exploit the car’s algorithm of ethics. This algorithm determines the car’s course of action in situations in which the loss of human life is unavoidable. As one of Ejetto’s engineers explains: If a driver is alone and a tree fell into his lane, and there was one car to his right carrying two passengers, and a car to his left carrying three passengers, E.J. would need to make a decision of where to crash. Because the car is programed to kill as few people as possible, in this example E.J. would run straight into the tree and kill the single driver. On the night of Adam’s death, someone had breached the backdoor and convinced E.J. that it was better to run over Adam than to avoid him.
