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?
A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#12Is 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…
What’s the reliability of the risk assessment?
If you child died because there was a 1% higher projected chance that two people would be killed in a collision... would that seem just?
I think the insistence on experimenting with autonomous driving outside of controlled access highways is insane.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#13Is 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…
89% percent chance to kill homeless person or 90% chance to kill pregnant woman?
> I don't see how attributes of the person would ever trump the probability of harm.
Maybe they shouldn't, maybe they should. How do we know? What are the terminal values? Society effectiveness? Or equality of all humans? Or minimizing public outcry in cases when autonomous car killed someone?
> The cases where probability is roughly equal for multiple actions will be incredibly rare.
With millions of autonomous cars on streets rare outcomes would happen all the time.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#14Can the car communicate over local network and check the pedestrians' credit scores?
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#15Does 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.
>Driverless cars will not be programmed to target victims by race
Not on purpose, but "machine learning" will have the same outcome:
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#16ahh a pseudo-science article coming from The New Yorker. A comic strip from Dilbert would give more insightful information.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#17“ 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 that it's mostly a theoretical problem. But in the long term, if I imagine a world where we all cars are self driving, there would still be accidents from time to time, for things that can't be predicted: a rock falls on the road, an earthquake happens and destroys the road, etc.
This would be rare, but would still kill a few thousand people every year. Wouldn't it be natural then to tweak the algorithm to reduce the death toll? I can imagine the public demanding it, and the software engineers to start writing code that deals with the rare case where an accident is inevitable. It could start very simple (avoid large groups of people), but could get more advanced over time.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#18These problems are always brought as a drawback to driverless cars but are completely irrelevant. How many "trolley" situations are there compared to the thousands of times where the choice is:
A. Human error causes cars to collide and kills people
B. The cars don't collide
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#19Is 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…
What’s the reliability of the risk assessment? If you child died because there was a 1% higher projected chance that two people would be killed in a collision... would that seem just? I think the insistence on experimenting with autonomous driving outside of controlled access highways is insane.
And what about the family of those two people?
I don't understand the insistence of bringing everything back to "what if it was your child." Pretty much everybody has family, and friends, and all that. I'm not sure how somebody being a child of somebody is supposed to be a rational argument for adjusting any of our thinking. As far as I can tell, it's basically the ultimate appeal to emotion.
Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics
#20ahh a pseudo-science article coming from The New Yorker. A comic strip from Dilbert would give more insightful information.
Well, he's recently started talking about self-driving cars, so it's on the cards: https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-25