Drivers Prefer Autonomous Cars That Don't Kill Them (hothardware.com)

"A new study shows that most people prefer that self-driving cars be programmed to save the most people in the event of an accident, even if it kills the driver," reports Information Week. "Unless they are the drivers." Slashdot reader MojoKid quotes an article from Hot Hardware about the new study, which was published by Science magazine. So if there is just one passenger aboard a car, and the lives of 10 pedestrians are at stake, the survey participants were perfectly fine with a self-driving car "killing" its passenger to save many more lives in return. But on the flip side, these same participants said that if they were shopping for a car to purchase or were a passenger, they would prefer to be within a vehicle that would protect their lives by any means necessary. Participants also balked at the notion of the government stepping in to regulate the "morality brain" of self-driving cars.
The article warns about a future where "a harsh AI reality may whittle the worth of our very existence down to simple, unemotional percentages in a computer's brain." MIT's Media Lab is now letting users judge for themselves, in a free online game called "Moral Machine" simulating the difficult decisions that might someday have to be made by an autonomous self-driving car.

Comments

It's a liability issue

[duckintheface]

Self driving cars will transfer the liability from the owner of the car to the manufacturer of the car. This is already happening. Otherwise, they could never sell a car to anyone. But if the liability is held by the manufacturer, you can be sure the crash algorithm will be one that minimizes total casualties (and thus total liability).

And notice that this is the same issue behind the Will Smith film, "I, Robot". Will's character is rescued from drowning by a robot that lets a little girl drown instead. The robot had calculated the chances of saving each and Will won the AI lottery.

Re: It's a liability issue

[hey!]

Ultimately the Three Laws were a literary device. Asimov was tired of stories where robots run amok, so he made up rules that would, on the face of it, make robots running amok seem impossible. He then used these rules to make superior robots-run-amok stories.

What makes those stories interesting is that they're all about how our simplistic reasoning leads us to dismiss real possibilities too quickly. Most people simply assume things work they way they were designed to work, but smart people realize that purposes can be gamed as long as the letter of the rules aren't broken. It is true that Asimov introduced a 0th Law, but the other laws remain in effect; robots in his stories are conflicted. In Jeff Vintar's screenplay the 0th law simply overrides the other laws; the lower priority rules are in effect nullified, which doesn't happen in Asimov's stories. The screenplay was a bog-standard robots run amok story with a little Asimovian window dressing thrown in, nowhere as good as anything Asimov did. Because Jeff Vintar isn't anywhere near as smart as Isaac Asimov.

But then again, neither am I, and probably not you either.

I very much doubt Asimov thought that people would ever build something like the Three Laws into technology in such a fundamental way; that was just a literary device that enabled him to display his astounding cleverness. I don't think it'll ever happen either, for the simple reason that killing people will be a driving for in the adoption of autonomous robot technology.