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

News at 5...

[x0ra]

People value their own lives..

Re:News at 5...

[PopeRatzo]

Sigh... this issue is so bloody simple to resolve.

1. Default to a default set of morals, which include a reasonable (but not excessive) degree of self-sacrifice - based around the sort of decisions a "typical" driver would make.

That sounds anything but simple.

Re: News at 5...

[bigpat]

The premise that people make split second ethical judgements is delusional. What people do is react. And many times they don't react in time to avoid the worst possible outcome.

And if they survive their brains spend hours, days, weeks and years even going over and over what happened. The brain in trying to learn from what happened adds more processing than was therein the first place.

Our false recollections. All the things you could have, should have, but didn't have time to think about when really all you had time to do was jerk the wheel and BAM!

And now a bunch of delusional people are trying to apply some false notion of ethics to decision making that should be as simple as stop the car before hitting something. There isn't enough time to consider other options. There never was enough time. People just think there was because our brains work that way.

Re:News at 5...

[fahrbot-bot]

1. Default to a default set of morals...

Um, what?

Make a straightforward procedure for people to customize the vehicle's morals.

Okay. Anyone with a goatee dies first. Child molesters and people that talk in the theater are next in line (in homage to Shepherd Book). I'm flexible after that, but the list *will* include people on cell phones who don't pay attention to their surroundings and people who take more than 5s to make a drink order at Starbucks. Any other suggestions?

Re: News at 5...

[anarcobra]

> should be as simple as stop the car before hitting something
So much this.
I have a really hard time thinking of any realistic situation where killing you will save 10 people.
What? Ten people are just standing out in the street and the only other option is to drive off a cliff?
Fuck them. Why are they in the middle of the road?
Just hit the brakes and hope for the best.
Since it's an automatic car it shouldn't be driving fast in a zone with pedestrians anyway, and people shouldn't be walking on highways.

That's normal

[rrohbeck]

Save the environment, reduce carbon emissions, save water, reduce debt... unless it affects me financially.

Re:It Doesn't Matter; It Won't Ever Happen

[Fwipp]

But the car doesn't need to make a psychic "This is the most valuable life" calculation/decision.

It just uses its regular crash-avoidance behavior (say, hitting the brakes), and maybe somebody dies. The cop on the scene decides that the pedestrian probably shouldn't have been trying to cross the freeway, and everyone else moves on with their lives. The end.

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.