A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics

Post by b_tterc_p » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

tempest-tost wrote: post #24

b_tterc_p wrote: post #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…

There is no such thing currently as reducing the risk of killing yourself or someone else with your car to 0. Braking distance and speed are insufficient variables to alter given people's preferences about the speed at which they'd wish to arrive at their destination. This will very likely also be the case when autonomous vehicles are deployed. There will be collisions, this is simply unfortunately a fact. Given that…

There is no probability of impending crash for which it is moral to give up trying to not crash and favor choosing who to kill. Probability is never 1.

Post by dnbgfher » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #55

dnbgfher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a call to humanity, not emotion. When you’re talking about selecting who dies with a 1% margin with some ML process with an unknown margin of error, I question your judgement.

I don't see how it's a call to humanity. "Think if it was your kid vs two strangers" isn't calling on humanity. It's calling on familial tribalism and selfishness if anything.

And obviously, in the real world, a ML-given estimate with a 1% variance is probably entirely useless. In these sorts of hypotheticals,I'm not sure why that really matters. You can play with the numbers as you want, or even move the whole question out far enough into the future that the margin of error can be considered very low. The question remains the same.

Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics

Re: A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics