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The Moral Dilemma of Driverless Cars: Save The Driver or Save The Crowd?
HughPickens.com writes: What should a driverless car with one rider do if it is faced with the choice of swerving off the road into a tree or hitting a crowd of 10 pedestrians? The answer depends on whether you are the rider in the car or someone else is, writes Peter Dizikes at MIT News. According to recent research most people prefer autonomous vehicles to minimize casualties in situations of extreme danger -- except for the vehicles they would be riding in. "Most people want to live in in a world where cars will minimize casualties," says Iyad Rahwan. "But everybody wants their own car to protect them at all costs." The result is what the researchers call a "social dilemma," in which people could end up making conditions less safe for everyone by acting in their own self-interest. "If everybody does that, then we would end up in a tragedy whereby the cars will not minimize casualties," says Rahwan. Researchers conducted six surveys, using the online Mechanical Turk public-opinion tool, between June 2015 and November 2015. The results consistently showed that people will take a utilitarian approach to the ethics of autonomous vehicles, one emphasizing the sheer number of lives that could be saved. For instance, 76 percent of respondents believe it is more moral for an autonomous vehicle, should such a circumstance arise, to sacrifice one passenger rather than 10 pedestrians. But the surveys also revealed a lack of enthusiasm for buying or using a driverless car programmed to avoid pedestrians at the expense of its own passengers. "This is a challenge that should be on the mind of carmakers and regulators alike," the researchers write. "For the time being, there seems to be no easy way to design algorithms that would reconcile moral values and personal self-interest."
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>People probably choose to veer away from hitting people because they don't realize they might kill themselves - they just see what is in front of them and sure to happen, and don't have the time or wherewithall to consider the unknown consequences.
Well that fits my personal experience. The worst car accident I ever had happened when I swerved to avoid a hazzard on a highway while travelling at high speed. I ended up on the traffic island where I crashed into a tree.
This is where modern automotive technology makes a huge difference however. Despite hitting a tree head-on at 120km/h I walked away with nary a scratch. Airbags and crumplezones kept myself and my passengers alive and almost entirely uninjured. Car was utterly destroyed, but that's better than humans being hurt.
But thinking back - yes, that's exactly how it went. When you see a sudden hazard on the road at high speed there is simply no TIME to think through a chain of consequences or evaluate multiple possible chains of events. You can do this when you have more time - but modern ABS enabled cars can probably achieve a safe dead-stop in the same time - but when it's a sudden hazard like a large animal running onto the road out of bushes where it was hidden (as happened to me)
there is just no time to do that. You deal with the problem immediately in front of you using the first viable option - you swerve to avoid, trying to regain control and avoid subsequent problems caused by the swerve becomes something you think about *after* you've swerved. You may not have the time to actually process what new problems there are and react to them at all (I sure didn't) but you simply cannot consider them beforehand. Not to mention that the bit of thought you can spare is based on the extremely limited information and judgement calls. Part of why I chose to swerve towards the island was that (1) it meant not crossing other lanes which would potentially cause me to hit other cars and (2) the plants on the island appeared to be small shrubs - unlikely to cause major damage even if I couldn't avoid hitting one. Turns out that despite being pruned low - that thing had a massive trunk capable of turning my engine into something resembling an empty tin can in a vaccuum.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *