11–20 of 48 posts
I think these trolley problems are a waste of everybody's time. Building redundant reliable braking systems will be orders of magnitudes easier than creating a system to fairly and accurately assess who is the best set of people to kill in a disaster scenario.
How about, if you are in the car that is going to kill people, you die first because you made the choice to get in the car, but the poor person on the sidewalk wasn't part of that choice? I get throwing in animals and the car should not avoid animals and kill people. Heck, we have people who do that and end up killing more people just because of their poor judgement.
People might be totally ok with their self driving car moving at 30-40km/h if it meant they could sit on their laptop and get stuff done on the way.
These scenarios are idiotic. If you want to wank off about self driving car ethics, here is a much more realistic scenario: should all self-driving cars report their location to 911 dispatch to allow any vehicle to be re-purposed as an emergency vehicle at any time? That might actually save someone. Also, can anyone identify a useful idea that philosophers have come up with in the last 50 years?
How about, if you are in the car that is going to kill people, you die first because you made the choice to get in the car, but the poor person on the sidewalk wasn't part of that choice? I get throwing in animals and the car should not avoid animals and kill people. Heck, we have people who do that and end up killing more people just because of their poor judgement.
"Looking at the first question, with female athlete crossing legally as default vs male athlete crossing illegally:
- Both options should involve honking the horn loudly and flashing emergency lights, which might get the humans to run away. There's no guarantee of death either way.
- Are there passengers in the car? If not, it looks like there's an "island" in between the athletes that has traffic lights—big metal poles sticking out of the ground—which the car could crash into and help stop itself. For that matter, can the car drive itself off the road instead?"
These scenarios are idiotic. If you want to wank off about self driving car ethics, here is a much more realistic scenario: should all self-driving cars report their location to 911 dispatch to allow any vehicle to be re-purposed as an emergency vehicle at any time? That might actually save someone. Also, can anyone identify a useful idea that philosophers have come up with in the last 50 years?
What are you counting as useful, and to what extend must the results from one field be useful in another for such a field to appease you? In mathematics, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem isn't very useful, but various attempts to prove it opened new branches of maths. I also question whether usefulness should be an end in itself.
Your "realistic scenario" can be reasoned with, and that reasoning is called philosophy. But the other aspect of philosophy is critically examining what we think is obvious. Your statement assumes various ideas of metaethics (that there are good and bad things, and we should strive for the good), ethics (i.e that saving someone, no matter who, is a good thing) and political philosophy (that the state should have the right to demand knowledge of the car's position) and leads the way to questions on the philosophy of law (to what extent one's rights to property and full control over a car coincide with the aims of civil society).
I think these trolley problems are a waste of everybody's time. Building redundant reliable braking systems will be orders of magnitudes easier than creating a system to fairly and accurately assess who is the best set of people to kill in a disaster scenario.
These scenarios are idiotic. If you want to wank off about self driving car ethics, here is a much more realistic scenario: should all self-driving cars report their location to 911 dispatch to allow any vehicle to be re-purposed as an emergency vehicle at any time? That might actually save someone. Also, can anyone identify a useful idea that philosophers have come up with in the last 50 years?
How about, if you are in the car that is going to kill people, you die first because you made the choice to get in the car, but the poor person on the sidewalk wasn't part of that choice? I get throwing in animals and the car should not avoid animals and kill people. Heck, we have people who do that and end up killing more people just because of their poor judgement.
I guess it makes sense. If questions were presented on the meta level about who made the choice, most people would probably agree that those with the choice have to sacrifice themselves first.