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Moral Machine

moralmachine.mit.edu

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Re: Moral Machine

#21

Post by 1999 »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #18
1999 wrote: post #9

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?

Did Schrodinger put a cat in a box?

2018 - 1935 = 83

Also, in particular, see the segment from 0:45 to 1:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI

Re: Moral Machine

#22

Post by TheSmiddy »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #17
TheSmiddy wrote: post #3

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.

Trolley problems are not about trolleys. Don't take them literally (e.g. Schrodinger's cat).

The original trolley problem of "should you let 5 people die or actively kill 1 to save the 5" has genuine philosophical merit, these however are just so contrived they can't possibly offer any meaningful insight while at the same time planting the seed in the general public that this is the type of problem a self driving car should care about which could cause all kinds of wacky regulations to exist.

Re: Moral Machine

#23

Post by cscurmudgeon »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #22
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trolley problems are not about trolleys. Don't take them literally (e.g. Schrodinger's cat).

The original trolley problem of "should you let 5 people die or actively kill 1 to save the 5" has genuine philosophical merit, these however are just so contrived they can't possibly offer any meaningful insight while at the same time planting the seed in the general public that this is the type of problem a self driving car should care about which could cause all kinds of wacky regulations to exist.

Agreed.

Re: Moral Machine

#24

Post by 1999 »

woodruffw wrote: post #13
1999 wrote: post #9

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?

If you’ll give me 5 more, the Gettier Problem[1] turned 55 this year. Most work in nonmonotonic reasoning is also under 50 years old. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

I guess if you count logicians as philosophers then philosophy is useful. It is probably just "ethics" that deserves my scorn. If ethicysts were really out there studying good and evil in the world, one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police.

Re: Moral Machine

#25

Post by baroffoos »

zzzcpan wrote: post #10
k2xl wrote: post #4

I remember seeing this last year. Issue I have with the choices is that it is missing an option: flip a coin. On some of the questions, I find the options morally equivalent. So in these situations, if I were programming a solution, I would leave it up to chance and use a random number generator to decide the fate.

Why would you program a solution that has to kill people? If you are aware of specific situations, shouldn't you program a solution that completely avoids such situations and saves everyone?

Some situations cant be avoided like if something falls off the car in front of you. In a real car you could swerve to avoid it and you will likely kill whoever is on the side of the road you swerve at but you will get away with it because it was a panic response and there was no way for you to properly assess what to do. This changes with self driving cars because they have all the info available and don't panic. The decision on what to do was planned and programmed in an office with plenty of time.

Re: Moral Machine

#26

Post by woodruffw »

1999 wrote: post #24
woodruffw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ll give me 5 more, the Gettier Problem[1] turned 55 this year. Most work in nonmonotonic reasoning is also under 50 years old. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

I guess if you count logicians as philosophers then philosophy is useful. It is probably just "ethics" that deserves my scorn. If ethicysts were really out there studying good and evil in the world, one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police.

> one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police

Just to set aside the fact that "being murdered" is a terrible metric (do you gauge marine biologists by their diving skills, or astrophysicists by their ability to survive in a vacuum?): a good many philosophers were either murdered or narrowly avoided being murdered in the World War II and/or the Holocaust. Any profession that includes a doctrine of skepticism tends to be among the first targeted for persecution, even if that persecution doesn't involve literal acts of murder.

Ethics involves more than just doing good or bad -- it involves figuring out what we mean by "good" and "bad" to begin with, whether these things correspond to actions, individuals, or outcomes, whether they have respective orderings, and so forth. All of these questions lend themselves better to prolonged thought and discourse rather than sample sizes and expensive scientific instruments.

Re: Moral Machine

#27

Post by 1999 »

claudiawerner wrote: post #16
1999 wrote: post #9

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?

>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 en…

In order to precisely define the term useful I'd have to wade into the murky depths of philosophy, which I don't want to do.

I was suggesting that philosophers would like to reason about my scenario because it would be a lot more interesting than imagining you could build a car that would somehow be forced to choose between running over i.e. ten elderly people or two children, and speculating about who you would program the car to kill. I know my scenario leads to a lot of interesting questions -- unlike the scenarios proposed by the website.

But I reject the claim that any reasoning about the scenario is necessarily philosophy. That's just what philosophers want you to think. For example, imagine if philosophers studied the behaviour of ducks and called it duckosophy. When a duck observes another duck, is that duckosophy? I would say no. The duck would do that even if humans never existed. The relationship is asserted purely on the side of the philosophers. So, I am a non-philosopher, and I reason about things based on knowledge due to lots of other non-philosophers, I'm not engaging in philosophy, even if a bunch of uninvolved people want to assert so.

Re: Moral Machine

#28

Post by zappo2938 »

1999 wrote: post #9

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?

It is a tradition that all boats respond to distress signals in their vicinity. “A master of a ship at sea, which is in a position to be able to provide assistance on receiving a signal from any source that persons are in distress at sea, is bound to proceed with all speed to their assistance.” [0]

[0] https://www.sealaw.com/maritime-law-cruise-ships-and-assista...

Re: Moral Machine

#29

Post by 1999 »

woodruffw wrote: post #26
1999 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you count logicians as philosophers then philosophy is useful. It is probably just "ethics" that deserves my scorn. If ethicysts were really out there studying good and evil in the world, one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police.

> one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police Just to set aside the fact that "being murdered" is a terrible metric (do you gauge marine biologists by their diving skills, or astrophysicists by their ability to survive in a vacuum?): a good many philosophers were either murdered or narrowly avoided being murdered in the World War II and/or the Holocaust. Any profession…

I chose the 50-year interval to make it difficult since the last 50 years have been pretty stable and comfortable in anglo countries, relatively speaking.

Here is something ethicists could analyze that would really help convince me that they are taking it seriously: given the cost, the years from your life, the job prospects, and the success percentage, is it ethical to accept someone as a doctoral student specializing in ethics? Maybe they could study different universities and see which make the cut and which don't.

I agree that skeptics are persecuted so if I see group that ought to be skeptics but no one is trying to persecute them, I wonder.

Re: Moral Machine

#30

Post by whyte_mackay »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #3

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.

I hear this often (that trolley problem is not relevant), but then I discovered that a lot of realistic ML fairness problems can be restated as a trolley problem.

You have a classifier for credit assignment (giving a loan, etc.). The classifier is 99% accurate on the entire population. The classifier is 55% accurate on a small minority. You can improve the minority accuracy to 90% at the cost of 0.3% decrease of general accuracy. What do you do?

For self-driving: Your accident rate is 0.0001% for the entire population. Your accident rate is 0.0003% for black pedestrians at night. You can allocate more compute/research/resources to equalize the accident rate of black pedestrians at the cost of increasing accident rate for the entire population to 0.00011% (or keeping it constant where you may have seen an improvement if you focused on the general population). What do you do?

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