Slashdot Mirror
Selectable Ethics For Robotic Cars and the Possibility of a Robot Car Bomb
Rick Zeman writes Wired has an interesting article on the possibility of selectable ethical choices in robotic autonomous cars. From the article: "The way this would work is one customer may set the car (which he paid for) to jealously value his life over all others; another user may prefer that the car values all lives the same and minimizes harm overall; yet another may want to minimize legal liability and costs for herself; and other settings are possible. Philosophically, this opens up an interesting debate about the oft-clashing ideas of morality vs. liability." Meanwhile, others are thinking about the potential large scale damage a robot car could do.
Lasrick writes Patrick Lin writes about a recent FBI report that warns of the use of robot cars as terrorist and criminal threats, calling the use of weaponized robot cars "game changing." Lin explores the many ways in which robot cars could be exploited for nefarious purposes, including the fear that they could help terrorist organizations based in the Middle East carry out attacks on US soil. "And earlier this year, jihadists were calling for more car bombs in America. Thus, popular concerns about car bombs seem all too real." But Lin isn't too worried about these threats, and points out that there are far easier ways for terrorists to wreak havoc in the US.
Lasrick writes Patrick Lin writes about a recent FBI report that warns of the use of robot cars as terrorist and criminal threats, calling the use of weaponized robot cars "game changing." Lin explores the many ways in which robot cars could be exploited for nefarious purposes, including the fear that they could help terrorist organizations based in the Middle East carry out attacks on US soil. "And earlier this year, jihadists were calling for more car bombs in America. Thus, popular concerns about car bombs seem all too real." But Lin isn't too worried about these threats, and points out that there are far easier ways for terrorists to wreak havoc in the US.
Hope you enjoyed the ride ha ha
Yeah, run for office...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wonder whether your insurance company would demand to know how you have set your car, and adjust your rates accordingly?
BSOD starts to take on a whole new meaning..
As does, crash dump, interrupt trigger, dirty block and System Panic...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Because ethicists like making work for themselves -- it's unethical to wait for another disaster or human rights violation just so you can do more work!
Dear government, Please shut up bout terrorism and get out of the way of innovation. sincerely, informed citizen
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
1) The cars will most likely be set by the company that sold it - with few if any modifications legally allowable by the owner.
2) Most likely ALL cars will be told to be mostly selfish, on the principle that they can not predict what someone else will do, and in an attempt to save an innocent pedestrian might in fact end up killing them. The article has the gall to believe the cars will have FAR greater predictive power than they will most likely have.
3) A human drivable car with a bomb and a timer in it is almost as deadly as a car that can drive into x location and explode is. The capability of moving the car another 10 feet or so into the crowd, as opposed to exploding on the street is NOT a significant difference, given a large explosion.
4) The cars will be so trackable and with the kind of active, real time security monitoring, that we will know who programmed it and when, probably before the bomb goes off. These are expensive, large devices that by their very nature will be wired into a complex network. It is more likely the cars will turn around and follow the idiot, all the time it's speakers screaming out "ARREST THAT GUY HE PUT A BOMB IN ME!"
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Let's skip "car" because I can, in theory, attach enough explosives(and shrapnel) to kill a large number of people to a simple homemade quadrotor, run with open source software, give it a dead-reckoning path and fire and forget from a relatively inconspicuous location. Multiple simultaneously, if I have the amount of resources a car bomb would require.
Automation is here. Being paranoid about one particular application of it won't help anyone.
It sure seems like such selectable ethics concerns are kind of jumping the gun. Regulatory behavior is going to clamp down on such options faster than you can utter "Engage!". Personally I would want my autonomous car to be designed with the most basic "don't get in a crash" goal only, as I suspect regulators will as well.
Far more important is the idea that we will have at least an order of magnitude or two increase in the amount of code running a car. If Toyota had trouble with the darn throttle (replacing the function of a cable with a few sensors and a bunch of code), how can we trust that car companies will be able to manage a code base this big without frequent catastrophe? Adding extra complexity to tweak the "ethics" of the car just sounds like guilding the lilly, which increases the opportunities for bugs to creep in.
I, for one, cannot wait for the day when I can set my car's logic system to different ethical settings, sorted by philosopher. For instance, you can set your car to "Jeremy Bentham", which will automatically choose whoever looks less useful to ram into when in a crash situation. You could also set it to "Plato", which will cause the car to ram into whoever appears less educated (just hope it doesn't happen to be you).
Just make sure you don't set the car to "Nietzsche".
From TFA:
WTF?!? That makes no sense.
Again, WTF?!? Who would design a machine that would take control away from a person TO HIT AN OBSTACLE? That's a mess of legal responsibility.
No. No they are not. The only "many folks" who are talking about it are people who have no concept of what it takes to program a car.
Or legal liability.
No, it is not "plausible". Not at all. You are speculating on a system that would be able to correctly identify ALL THE OBJECTS IN THE AREA and that is never going to happen.
Wired is being stupid in TFA.
So, the FBI is already making the case for, "We need full monitoring and control intervention capability for everybody's new cars, because terrorists."
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I'm not really sure why they call it 'ethics of the car' not ethics of the owner or programmer, or administrator of the car.
If you put a bomb in a robot car and had tell it to drive to a statium, the car didn't fail to make an ethical choice. I doubt the car would even be aware of the bomb, or what a bomb is, or why its bad.
Judging from Monday morning traffic in my town, a lot of people already set their cars to that setting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just wait until the AI has to keep track of liability awards so that it can make the correct decision regarding minimizing liability. At some point you are going to have a stupid jury award and all the cars are just going to refuse to go anywhere because the AI's cost benefit analysis says "just stay in park".
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
No. To minimize damage, you'd have to brake when approaching a child. To minimize liability, you have to accelerate when you notice that you can't stop in time to avoid severe injury, i.e. to ensure death which is cheaper than a lifetime cripple.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Can I program mine to always claim to other vehicles that I have 7 babies on board?
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
"Patrick Lin writes about a recent FBI report that warns of the use of robot cars as terrorist and criminal threats, calling the use of weaponized robot cars "game changing." "
Only if the potential terrorist have never learned to drive. Because otherwise :
1) for criminal you will be far better off with a car which do not respect speed limit/red lights/stops if you want to run away
2) a terrorist can simply drive the bomb somewhere then set it to explode one minute later and go away. What is the difference if he drove it himself or not ?
Terrorism is the least worry with robot car.
As for point 1 , laws and insurance will be setting your car "ethics" and not you personally.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That does not matter because it won't be an option.
That is because "A.I." cars will never exist.
They will not exist because they will have to start out as less-than-100%-perfect than TFA requires. And that imperfection will lead to mistakes.
Those mistakes will lead to lawsuits. You were injured when a vehicle manufactured by "Artificially Intelligent Motors, inc (AIM, inc)" hit you by "choice". That "choice" was programmed into that vehicle at the demand of "AIM, inc" management.
So no. No company would take that risk. And anyone stupid enough to try would not write perfect code and would be sued out of existence after their first patch.
You get less human rights complaints when you let the children(or entire populations) stave by using robots for your cheap labour instead of paying them a pittance. :(
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
First you'd need to root the car and run "echo 1 > /dev/morality/evil"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It will, if it's an Asimov car. The law should only be Second Rule. No death to humans is the First.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This discussion is pointless mental masturbation because none of these things will be real problems with autonomous cars. The people dreaming up these scenarios do not understand the fundamental paradigm shift that comes with autonomous vehicles
- Firstly, any thoroughfare staffed with autonomous cars should never have pedestrian access, because the cars will all be travelling at maximum safe speed constantly, like 110K+ even on city streets. These streets should be fenced not allowing pedestrians.
- Secondly, In situations where pedestrians are involved, which are inherently unpredictable, the car will never drive faster than it would be able to stop and not hit ANY pedestrian... thus, this whole "choose 1 or 5" scenario is not possible.
- Finally, you won't be able to manually point the car at people and then later have the car "take over". You will not have any ability to drive the car manually, period. At least I bloody well hope not... once autonomous cars are standard, people should not be allowed to drive any more.
-
echo "chaotic_evil" >
That's why it hasn't been working for you.
There's also a kernel patch on evil.org to change the default setting. With the standard kernel, it is set to "lawful_neutral". In that mode, it will honk and swerve for a little old lady crossing the street.
lawful_good would stop, and offer her a ride.
chaotic_evil will run her over, back up and do it again, and the lower loot collection hook will deploy to take her purse.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Modded "flamebait", but you're sort of right. The hard part of blowing something up is getting the cash together, obtaining enough explosives, and finding the right target and opportunity, all that without having some security agency get wind of your plans. Finding some poor deluded soul willing to blow himself up for a crappy cause is actually the easy part, especially if you can draw from a pool of religious nuts. And islam has plenty of those, sad to say.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That wouldn't work either, because you forgot to set the evil bit.