As part of the University of Delaware Library Assembly of Professional Staff (UDLAPS) Scholar in the Library series, Thomas M. Powers, associate professor in UD’s Department of Philosophy, will present “Self-Driving Cars: Some Ethics and Policy Considerations” at noon, Monday, Dec. 5, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library.

Powers is the founding director of the Center for Science, Ethics and Public Policy at the University and holds a faculty appointment at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute.

His research concerns ethics in science and engineering, the philosophy of technology, and environmental ethics and policy.

Powers received a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from the College of William and Mary and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.

He has been a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst-Fulbright dissertation-year fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, a National Science Foundation fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia, and a visiting researcher in the Laboratoire d'Informatique, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in France.

Powers’ talk will address how self-driving cars may be broadly adopted within a few decades. Before this can happen, there are technical problems that need to be resolved.

Also, ethical questions related to safety and equity need to be answered, and policies regarding access to roadways, liability, and assumed risk need reconsideration. He will focus on these ethical and policy issues and survey some of the solutions that researchers in the field have proposed.

The brown-bag luncheon program is open to the public. Light refreshments will be available.