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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.
Saving the occupants of the car is the only choice that makes sense in the context of potentially malicious input. For instance, if Mercedes stated that their car would swerve into a tree instead of hitting a crowd of 5 pedestrians, what's to stop me and 4 friends from jumping out in front of the cars just to laugh as it crashes itself to "save" us.
We have got to start embedding deep into the mind of every software engineer that any information from outside your system can be manipulated to cause maximum damage or disruption. It is your system's responsibility to safely handle malformed and malicious inputs. Until this becomes a common mode of thought, expect more IoT botnets, SQL injections, buffer overflows, DOS amplifiers and the entire realm of "oh crap someone somewhere could be evil, I only engineered for the happy case".
There really is no other logical way to approach this. If they went the other way and prioritized the pedestrian, a psychopath could sprint back and forth across a busy freeway, causing accident after accident and injuring or killing lots of innocent passengers.
Are you so sure? SUV's are very popular in the US, and they are designed in a way where when they hit a normal car, they hit it further above, where the car is "softer" than below, where there is a crunch zone. Unfortunately the soft part is partly made of the inhabitants of the normal car.
So people already have decided that they like the "crowd" variant and not the "brick wall" one.
What they are really saying here is that the car is designed with passenger safety in mind, and the AI won't even try to consider pedestrians and other drivers. It will just stop as quickly as possible and avoid things that might hurt the occupant, like most humans given a fraction of a second to act on mostly instinct would.
The trolley problem relies on there being sufficient time to make a decision, but not enough to take any other action. It's unrealistic and was only ever intended as a thought experiment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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If there's malicious input, then the driver is the problem. Stop and lock the car. If the car has been compromised, then any focus on safety must be assumed to also be compromised. Do everything possible to stop and lock the car.
The above post deserves to be seen. It is the only logical response to the power-trip fantasies otherwise being proposed in this thread. Anything else makes Mercedes-Benz liable as a company.
The question of what AI prioritizes as it becomes ubiquitous technology is a matter of life and death for some people in the future.
There are far more important things to worry about, and Mercedes is correct in their assessment that the value added work to be performed is in avoiding these situations altogether. The percentage of actual auto accidents in which there is some moral conundrum that requires a decision as to which person or persons is going to die are vanishingly small. There is almost never a situation in which the only path to safety is through the crowd...
GP is right. Philosophy is for those who can't actually *DO*. Philosophers try to make up for that lacking by trying to tell others what they "should" do.
To all those liberal arts majors out there, progress is made by the scientists and engineers who roll up their sleeves and do the work, not that wank all idiots who sit and talk about it all day. If you want some say in what gets done, then be one of the people who does the work, otherwise shut up sit down and enjoy the ride because you're going to be a passenger in your own life.
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