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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."
... and laugh and run off as the driver's car kills the driver.
Self-driving cars will have face recognition, evaluate the net worth of the targets compared to the net worth of the driver and choose who lives accordingly.
My point is still valid though. False dichotomy. The car should (and pretty much every driver-less car will) use maximum braking power to reduce speed as much as possible. In almost all cases it will do this long before becomes too late to stop without hitting anyone. This gives pedestrians the most time to get out of the way and if it hits them it does so at the lowest possible speed.
Further, when swerving you run the risk of a pedestrian diving out of the way, in the SAME direction that the car swerves.
Typically such "oh no I must choose which object hit" scenarios occur when the car is driving recklessly or the driver is inattentive, neither of which should apply to non-hacked self-driving cars.