Metrics question
As an ethical programming consultant for autonomous vehicles, how do you handle challenging situations where the vehicle must make decisions with potential negative consequences, like swerving to avoid a pedestrian at the risk of passenger safety?
- Metrics
- Hard
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What this question tests
AI and ethical product judgment: reasoning through a values trade-off in autonomous system design and translating it into a decision process.
How to approach it
- Clarify the scope: this is a policy and product decision, not a real-time in-the-moment human choice, since it's coded in advance.
- Identify the core tension: minimizing overall harm versus prioritizing the safety of the vehicle's own passengers.
- Propose a decision framework grounded in minimizing total harm and following existing traffic law and established safety norms, rather than ad hoc ethical calculus.
- Address transparency: the policy should be clearly disclosed to regulators and the public, not a hidden black-box choice.
- Define how success is measured, such as reduction in overall accident severity compared to human drivers, validated with regulators and safety data.
What a strong answer includes
- Reframes the classic trolley-problem framing into a practical policy and transparency question, which is more realistic for a PM role.
- Proposes grounding decisions in existing traffic law and minimizing total harm rather than inventing a personal ethical calculus.
- Emphasizes transparency and regulatory alignment as core to deploying such a system responsibly.
- Notes that success should be measured against the real baseline of human driver safety, not an idealized zero-harm standard.
Common mistakes
- Trying to solve the philosophical trolley problem definitively instead of framing it as a policy and transparency decision.
- Ignoring the need for regulatory and public transparency around how these decisions are coded.
- Not proposing any way to measure or validate the safety outcomes of the chosen policy.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle regulatory differences across countries on this issue?
- How would you communicate this policy transparently to the public?
- How would you validate that the policy actually reduces harm in practice?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop