61–70 of 72 posts
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Swerve (with 60% chance of survival) or break (with a 40% chance of survival). This may sound like sci-fi, but its simple math; if you know the distance of the hazard, coefficient of friction and speed. And you can crunch numbers really fast, these percentages are part of the decision process. And one puts the public at risk and the other puts the driver at risk. Now even if you had no more information and a utilitar…
These conundrums are irrelevant anyway. Over one million people die every year on the roads. The instant AI becomes better than humans, it's a moral imperative to adopt it, no matter what it does in these rare and contrived circumstances.
Not sure i'm so comfortable with this; it will result in a number of people killed who never accepted this risk and might have been safe. In order to save a number of people who accepted risk in the first place.
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But this is just making the choice and then pretending it hasn't been made.
There is no choice to be made, that is the problem with this line of thinking.
And if the purpose of autonomous vehicles, as is often stated, is to reduce the numbers of deaths (40,100 in 2017 in the US) and injuries related to such scenarios and vehicles, we have to have at least a tacit understanding of that which we are implicitly prioritizing, if nothing else. However, if the point is just to apply an ideology in the form of a technology, until everything in our lives is computerized, and considered in terms of computation, or if (as I've talked about before on here) it's about removing the need for God and Man to make the choice, then avoiding such questions is the very (inherently not so) explicit goal, as that we can neither admit to either wanting to create the black box nor that it is a black box.
The only way to truly not make the decision is to actually not make it, that is, for the motor vehicle to never be traveling in the first place.
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There is no choice to be made, that is the problem with this line of thinking.
(In this simple case) The vehicle currently traveling toward a stationary object. It has two possible courses of action (sensical action, perhaps would be better, as it could just continue at full speed, but I'll ignore that), but it can either A) attempt to stop before colliding with the object, or B) it can swerve around the object. Obviously, as stated, two possibilities are that if A the driver has a potential fo…
In any case, you lost me when you got to "the driver has a potential for an increased chance of death." How exactly do you propose a computer will calculate this? Even today's best supercomputers would take multiple orders of magnitude longer to model the odds than it would require to act on them, and even then it would just be a guess. Hell, we judge car safety today by ramming them into objects repeatedly to see how they perform on average, and it still has only a vague relationship to what might happen to you in an actual collision.
My point is that it is 100% unfeasible for the computer to model these probabilities, and I see no reason to think it will ever be feasible. Even without getting into the weird things like "what if the pedestrian is 99 years old, or a 20 year old pregnant woman?" the complexities are basically infinite.
So the only correct answer I see is for the computer to do exactly what we would expect a competent driver to do today: stop the car as quickly as possible. And assuming it's not overdriving it's sensors (something humans are not supposed to do either) then that should work damn near 100% of the time.
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No, I said 'Neither.' You presented a false dichotomy.
its not false, you get to choose, or a choice will be made on your behalf.
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(In this simple case) The vehicle currently traveling toward a stationary object. It has two possible courses of action (sensical action, perhaps would be better, as it could just continue at full speed, but I'll ignore that), but it can either A) attempt to stop before colliding with the object, or B) it can swerve around the object. Obviously, as stated, two possibilities are that if A the driver has a potential fo…
Humans are advised not to swerve around things, as a general rule, so I imagine similar logic works for self-driving cars. You're almost always better off -- for everyone concerned -- to dynamite the brakes and hope for the best. Swerving is a good way to lose control. In any case, you lost me when you got to "the driver has a potential for an increased chance of death." How exactly do you propose a computer will cal…
I would agree.
But my point is that making the decision, and then trying to say we're not making a decision, is disingenuous. So the question becomes: disingenuous to what end? We are making statements about what is or isn't permissible. In the case of the standard human laws, we (generally) find it impermissible for someone in such a situation to save their own life by ending someone else's, in the same way that if A puts a gun to B's head and says shoot C or die, for B to shoot C would be regarded in most jurisdictions as murder, regardless of any part A plays in the scenario. And replicating these laws in machines is perfectly fine. They, like us, have no chance of fully understanding any of the consequences of anything either of us experience, so we can probably only operate in a pragmatic functional fashion. However, in building a machine that replicates what is permissible in this way, as already applied to humans, we must also admit that we are instantiating in hardware a set of rules to, in certain circumstances, kill and or injure people, one way or the other. But we're doing this for the purpose of, also, preventing such where impermissible (and perhaps, even, reducing such overall). Yet, it still remains that we must construct what will do that; we must enact in a very precalculated fashion a predefined, concrete expression of what is permissible, and therefore, what is not permissible. But we, and this is the whole reason, I will contend, at the heart of the argument, and why the debate is a contentious as it is, that is that we very much do not want to admit to the expression. And only by saying the question can't be answered, therefore, here's an answer, can we do that.
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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 think it gets traction with self-driving cars because people, stupidly, expect computers to make perfect decisions 100% of the time 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 t…
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its not false, you get to choose, or a choice will be made on your behalf.
There is no choice. The car cannot calculate the probabilities, which is a prerequisite to being presented with a choice. No question, no choice, no decision. And nobody is going to try too hard to make it feasible, either, because the answer to that hypothetical question would be the same -- occupants and outsiders will both be safer if the car stops moving. So ... just stop the car.
The result of your choice, to brake or 'just stop' means there will be situations where passengers die to save real or theoretical pedestrians, as soon as this is established in the media the sales of these cars will plummet, and your decision will have repercussions increasing the number of human-accidents across the board.
> The car cannot calculate the probabilities
I think we may be talking about different things, probabilities are the foundation of self driving algorithms, there is never a 100% right place, just adjustments and corrections, calculations that lead to percentages that lead to choices. Maybe you are thinking about the older cruise control (like in some BMWs), they tried to anticipate things on the road and would brake faster than a human could, saved a few bumps, caused a few..
“ 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…
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.
Think about how stupid it is to program trolley problem logic. It suggests you program the car to purposefully crash into something. We will be absolutely fine just trying not to crash.
That means the car is constantly thinking to itself (“should I give up and just choose what to hit instead?”). No thanks.