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When Mercedes-Benz Starts Selling Self-Driving Cars, It Will Prioritize Driver's Safety Over Pedestrian's (inverse.com)
From a report on Inverse: When Mercedes-Benz starts selling self-driving cars, it will choose to prioritize driver safety over pedestrians', a company manager has confirmed. The ethical conundrum of how A.I.-powered machines should act in life-or-death situations has received more scrutiny as driverless cars become a reality, but the car manufacturer believes that it's safer to save the life you have greater control over. "You could sacrifice the car. You could, but then the people you've saved initially, you don't know what happens to them after that in situations that are often very complex, so you save the ones you know you can save," said Christoph von Hugo, Mercedes' manager of driver assistance systems. "If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car. This moral question of whom to save: 99 percent of our engineering work is to prevent these situations from happening at all. We are working so our cars don't drive into situations where that could happen and [will] drive away from potential situations where those decisions have to be made."As long as they are better at driving and safety than humans, it is a progress, in my opinion.
Sounds logical to me. Otherwise, why would I pay Mercedes-Benz to save other people? I am not an altruist and don't inspire to be one in life&death situations.
It means if they are much safer than human drivers it doesn't really matter who they are prioritizing since everyone will be benefitting still.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
It means instead of rolling the car in a ditch when children jump out in front, like a normal person would do, the car will kill the children. The wipers may automatically activate to clean their gore off your windshield as well.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What do you expect from the very germans who gassed 7,9 million jews, gipsy and homosexuals?
Anyhow, this is not a vendor choice. These decisions will be put into law by the nation state or the European Union (Mercedes is german and Germany is part of the EU). It will be put into a rule just like speed limits or the min and max blinking pace of the turn signal light. If Mercedes doesn't like what a nation state orders, they are free to go away.
Furthermore, even in US states or other backwards places which allow the Mercedes self-driving logic, the natural right to self-defence entitles pedestrians to carry an RPG-7 for use against ramming wehrmacht panzers, since pistols and other small arms are not effective at stopping a charging limousine.
Driving is about anticipation of events way more than reaction time.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That's a big "if", is currently false and will be false for hundreds of years still. This is declared intent to cause injury, making it a bit past borderline illegal. It is poorly thought through immoral marketing buzz. There is no positive angle to this "story" or even much to say except Mercedez-Benz has decided to let the interns do PR.
Actually, it's not that big an if.
Earlier this year, at a roundtable on connected car security headed up by the NHTSA, the chairman of the NHTSA stood up and cited some interesting numbers. A bit more than 32,000 people had died in vehicle-related accidents the prior year, and about 97% of those were the direct result of, and I quote, "driver error or driver choice." He went on to point out that autonomous vehicles would, if done correctly, eliminate most of those deaths. A car that will refuse to drive in certain conditions if, for example, the tire pressure is too low on one or more tires, or the brakes require more than a certain amount of force to slow the car to a certain standards...these are the less-obvious ways in which such cars are safer. Obviously, they can't drive drunk, don't commit road rage, and don't have any sense of ego about saying that they are having trouble with their eyesight. The car can be objective about its limits, its skills, and any impairment it suffers due to weather, maintenance issues, or any other potential problems. Just the degree of data logging alone that is inherent to autonomous vehicles is already producing useful information about how to prevent crashes, and that's before there are any such vehicles for sale. (And I hear it now..."Tesla sells autonomous vehicles!...but Tesla's system doesn't count, as evidenced by the fact that the maker of that system has cut ties with Tesla, basically saying "It's not supposed to be used that way!") Cars have reached the point where humans are the main source of the risk, and while the technology isn't quite ready-for-market, it's not "hundreds of years" away and it's very, very promising.
And no, what Mercedes is saying is not intent to cause injury. It's a statement about which injury to try and prevent in situations where...as this has been discussed for quite some time now...an injury is deemed inevitable. They have not said, "our cars will drive through schools for no particular reason, just to annoy Jzanu,." They have said, "our car's logic knows what's in the car, what's going on with the car, and can directly control the car. It does not know that much about the rest of the world, so we believe the odds of the best possible outcome in a situation with no good outcomes lies with letting the car preserve its own passengers."
And there is absolutely nothing illegal about that whatsoever. It's the same logic behind why paramedics don't run, ambulances slow down through intersections where they can't see past a certain distance, and a whole bunch of other situations where you have to weigh risk of one bad outcome against risk of another one.
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