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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should a car, generally prioritize the survival of its occupant or pedestrian? Not answering this is the same as answering it with ' surprise me '. And either answer is wrong.
Neither. It should just try to stop. Calculating fatality probabilities is way out of scope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should a car, generally prioritize the survival of its occupant or pedestrian? Not answering this is the same as answering it with ' surprise me '. And either answer is wrong.
You could ask the same question about human drivers, yet zero attention is paid to this question, and zero time is spent on it during driver training.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could ask the same question about human drivers, yet zero attention is paid to this question, and zero time is spent on it during driver training.
Is that perhaps why the question is so nettlesome?, it reveals something we've been living with all along and would've preferred to continue ignoring.
I think it gets traction with self-driving cars because people, stupidly, expect computers to make perfect decisions 100% of the time. This idea runs into a logical inconsistency when presented with a scenario in which there is no perfect decision. Rather than confront the fact that it's unreasonable to expect perfect decisions 100% of the time, people try to come up with a way to declare a perfect decision in a no-win scenario.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should a car, generally prioritize the survival of its occupant or pedestrian? Not answering this is the same as answering it with ' surprise me '. And either answer is wrong.
You could ask the same question about human drivers, yet zero attention is paid to this question, and zero time is spent on it during driver training.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should a car, generally prioritize the survival of its occupant or pedestrian? Not answering this is the same as answering it with ' surprise me '. And either answer is wrong.
Neither. It should just try to stop. Calculating fatality probabilities is way out of scope.
At some point it will have to be regulated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that perhaps why the question is so nettlesome?, it reveals something we've been living with all along and would've preferred to continue ignoring.
I really don't think so. It's ignored because it essentially never happens. The odds that you'll ever be presented with such a scenario are so low that it's pointless to spend any time on it. The odds that you'll be presented with such a scenario and the obvious best answer is something other than "maximum effort braking" are even lower. I think it gets traction with self-driving cars because people, stupidly, expect…
I don't think it's that people expect perfect decisions.
You are right that it essentially never happens with humans. But why doesn't it happen with humans? I think it is because if we are driving down a highway at high enough speed for this issue to arise, we probably aren't going to be aware of what is in our swerve path, and even if we are we probably don't have the time to recognize that we have to make a choice, nor the processing power to make such a choice.
Hence, there isn't really any need to consider this issue with human drivers because humans cannot make a decision in such a situation.
Self-driving cars, on the other, should have the sensors and the attention and the processing power to take into account everything to the side of the road in addition to what is on the road. With them, unlike with human drivers, it is actually possible for them to make a decision in these situations.
I think it is getting traction simply because with self-driving cars, unlike with human driven cars, it is actually a meaningful question. It's meaningful even if you assume that computers don't make perfect decisions--they at least have the time and data to make a decision, unlike humans.
The Trolley Problem is the most boring part of the ethics of autonomous driving. Would you tell a human driver to stay off the roads until they decide in advance what they'd do in such a ludicrous situation?
“ 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…
I agree with you that this example is so theoretical as to be useless. In addition, focusing on this masks some other more relevant ethical/legal questions. 1. If the car sees a police car flash it's lights for it to pull over, should it pull over unconditionally - not allowing the driver to over-ride? 2. If there is an Amber alert broadcast specifying the car, should it automatically try to alert the authorities as…
If "caught", the liability exposure is the same, so there's no downside. You can't incarcerate an algorithm or even take its license.