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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."
Here we go again. We just had this discussion last week too.
If the new slashdot owners are using the client base as fodder for some think-tank the least you could do is provide compensation after the first few times an article is recycled.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
As far as I can tell, the autonomous algorithms don't work this way and probably never will work this way. That is, they don't calculate potential fatalities for various scenarios and then pick the minimum one. The car's response in any particular situation will be effectively some combination of simpler heuristics -- simpler than trying to project casualty figures, while still being a rather complex set of rules.
Take one of these situations, and let's say the car ended up killing pedestrians and saving the occupants. The after-incident report for an accident like that is not going to read "the algorithm chose to save the occupants instead of the pedestrians". It's not going to read that way simply because that's not how the algorithm makes decisions. Instead the report is going to read something like "the algorithm gives extra weight to keeping the car on the road. In this situation, that resulted in putting the pedestrians in greater danger than the car's occupants. However, we still maintain that, on average, this results in a safer driving algorithm, even if it does not optimize the result of every possible accident."
And regarding the "every possible accident" part of that: it is simply impossible to imagine an algorithm so perfect that, in any situation, it can optimize the result based on some pre-determined moral outcome. So it's not just "well, let's change how the algorithms work, then". Such an algorithm that makes driving decisions in any possible weird decision based on predicting fatalities, rather than relying on heuristics (however complex they are) is simply not realistic.
1. Any company TRYING to write code with the intention of killing/injuring the user will be sued out of existence.
2. Whichever executive ordered the techs to write such code would never work again.
3. Even if you allow a theoretical situation that bypasses #1 & #2, complex software is very difficult to write. The company (and executive and coders) would be sued out of existence when the car killed/injured the passenger to avoid running over a box of toy dolls.
And yet we keep seeing this bullshit on /. People here are supposed to be more informed on the topics of AI and robotics and programming than the average. But here we are, again.