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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.
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".