A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
newyorker.com
A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
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Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#2https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm
>Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#3Is it just me or does solving the moral dilemma of prioritization based on attributes of the person seem like a worthless endeavor? In practice, I can't come up with a case where it would matter.
For example, a more reasonable metric for a machine to use is the probability of injury/death. If swerving is 90% likely to kill a person and staying straight is only 89% likely, then staying straight is a better choice. I don't see how attributes of the person would ever trump the probability of harm. The cases where probability is roughly equal for multiple actions will be incredibly rare.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#4https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm >Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability.
It used to be that Ivy League colleges laundered privelege into elite degrees for people who would become consultants who gave an aura of legitimacy to biased decisions. Maybe the robots will put them out of a job.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#5“ if a car detects a sudden obstacle—say, a jackknifed truck—should it hit the truck and kill its own driver, or should it swerve onto a crowded sidewalk and kill pedestrians? A human driver might react randomly (if she has time to react at all), but the response of an autonomous vehicle would have to be programmed ahead of time. ”
I hate this logic. No, it didn’t need to be programmed ahead of time. It should try to avoid crashing. It shouldn’t try to solve a philosophical problem. We don’t want to require our cars to observe it’s surroundings and calculate number of things identified as humans to minimize expected loss of life. That’s difficult and error prone.
If you’re going down a street and something jumps in your way, make the program try not to hit anything. Ideally by braking, because you shouldn’t be going fast enough to not be able to do so based on your environment.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#6Does this have anything to do with driverless cars?
Driverless cars will not be programmed to target victims by race, and driverless cars' main benefit is reaction time to take simple safe actions like stopping the vehicle or turning into an open space.
The car systems won't have elaborate neural nets for deciding when to jump over a pylon onto a train track.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#7These discussions always bring up the Trolley Problem which I find to be pretty insidious. The trolley problem is designed to hide the real moral issue. Here is the original Trolley Problem for comparison.
“Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose airplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots the mob have five hostages, so that in both examples the exchange is supposed to be one man's life for the lives of five.”
The whole thing starts with a pretty elitist framework, that the best way to run society is to lie to the public because they can’t be trusted. The problem then ends with the infamous trolley problem which is so stripped down of any context it’s basically a dark pattern. You are expected to choose who is to die instead of wondering why do people keep getting run over by trolleys? Why does anyone have to die? Why can’t the track workers have safe working conditions?
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#8Is it just me or does solving the moral dilemma of prioritization based on attributes of the person seem like a worthless endeavor? In practice, I can't come up with a case where it would matter. For example, a more reasonable metric for a machine to use is the probability of injury/death. If swerving is 90% likely to kill a person and staying straight is only 89% likely, then staying straight is a better choice. I d…
It's the ultimate bikeshed. The only winning move is not to play.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#9https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm >Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability.
It used to be that Ivy League colleges laundered privelege into elite degrees for people who would become consultants who gave an aura of legitimacy to biased decisions. Maybe the robots will put them out of a job.
Consultants are the ones legitimizing the robots
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#10“ if a car detects a sudden obstacle—say, a jackknifed truck—should it hit the truck and kill its own driver, or should it swerve onto a crowded sidewalk and kill pedestrians? A human driver might react randomly (if she has time to react at all), but the response of an autonomous vehicle would have to be programmed ahead of time. ” I hate this logic. No, it didn’t need to be programmed ahead of time. It should try to…
And even if a car was implausibl in the same situation with the same options, it still of course could choose a response randomly or arbitrarily based on how the sorting algorithm happened to rank equal outcomes.