The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
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The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
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Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#2However it works out, on the whole, there will be fewer deaths and injuries with autonomous cars.
So, we can try to weight the different scenarios to give one a handicap over another --but this pales in comparison to all the lives saved by having autonomous cars.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#3I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth.
Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article itself points out that other, more normal safety features are being included that lower the risk from accidental collisions and the cars might not be going fast enough for this sort of issue to be a concern in most instances (read, those not involving a motorway or autobahn). And in those cases, well, anyone who might be in the path of such a car in such a situation might be best classed as 'too dumb to live', since high speed roads are not good places for pedestrian crossings or playing chicken.
But in the 0.00001% of cases which this issue might be a thing, then they should honestly just value the driver and passengers. Like every other tool and item in human society,for good or bad alike.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#4I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article…
"Me first" is pretty dumb in the global sense. Cooperative (nit me first) games are the way to greater benefit for everyone.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#5Talk about pointless edge case. It's so incredibly rare, you can just have the car protect the passenger and that's fine. My biggest concern about self driving cars is the ability to mess with the image recognition software. How hard would it be to flash a piece of material at a lidar/radar and confuse it that so much that it either crashes / goes into DOS / or thinks a minivan full of babies is cruising down the road towards it.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#6I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article…
I agree. If doing so makes people more willing to adopt driverless cars, it may save more lives.
However, if the person would only be injured, it should prefer that to someone else's death (as the person himself would be legally obligated to do.)
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#7I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article…
I actually got a rather deep insight from the article, which was "How would an autonomous car get itself into such a situation?"
Such a car would not drive so close to a truck that it could not simply stop should the truck lose its cargo. It would not approach a tunnel at a rate of speed where it could not brake to avoid an obstruction. People do that because they ignore risk in favor of some perceived time advantage, but robots don't.
If we imagine the sets of circumstances that require a life and death decision to occur while driving safely, suddenly the number becomes vanishingly small. Things like "an earthquake occurs and the bridge you are on loses a section." or "a power transformer explodes and drops a power line across the road", or "a plane crashes into the ground in front of you." Under these extreme situations how the human in control would perform is practically a random number function. That a robot would minimize the loss of life, seems like the "correct" choice regardless.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#8I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article…
I think the issue is slightly misguided as well, but not quite in that way. I think it's sort of natural that the idea of a merged driver and driverless vehicle lanes will eventually vanish, and sections of highway and city roads will eventually give way to entirely autonomous solutions. Segregating the driving population in this way removes a lot of the concerns, since now when faced with the issue of "wayward child in road", a single car doesn't have to make a decision, but instead, collectively cars decide how to mitigate the situation.
This does come with quite a few caveats in regards to road surveillance and infrastructure and legal turnabout, but it makes a lot more sense than trying to merge the two completely different styles of driving. Essentially that is the problem that will cause accidents; pretty much everyone who drive should know that traffic patterns that deviate from what is expected and currently existing on the road are common causes for accidents. Trying to merge two completely separate types of driving just seems like a fools errand, though I do understand that the alternative would probably be a bit too much for the current public and governments.
Ultimately though, I think that while the ethical concerns are real, they become greatly diminished along with the natural evolution of where autonomous cars take city infrastructure.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#9I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article…
People who worry about the moral decision-making of a car are pointing out that there's a sort of ethics reduction (in the math sense of the word) here: deciding on the ideal driverless car is about as hard as deciding on what the ideal moral framework is. The car must have some routine to deal with trolley problems somewhere.
Re: The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
#10I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article…
I actually got a rather deep insight from the article, which was "How would an autonomous car get itself into such a situation?" Such a car would not drive so close to a truck that it could not simply stop should the truck lose its cargo. It would not approach a tunnel at a rate of speed where it could not brake to avoid an obstruction. People do that because they ignore risk in favor of some perceived time advantage…
Yeah, the chance of such a situation occurring is pretty much slim to none. A driverless car isn't going to be driving like a maniac at many times the speed limit and putting itself into dangerous situations at every opportunity.
Then again, given some of the stuff there's a market for, I guess there is the worry that 'driverless car aimed at person who wants to be in James Bond/Bullitt/whatever' might turn out to be a selling point for some manufacturers with questionable ethics.