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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.