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In a Crash, Should Self-Driving Cars Save Passengers or Pedestrians? 2 Million People Weigh In (pbs.org)
In what is referred to as the "Moral Machine Experiment", a survey of more than two million people from nearly every country on the planet, people preferred to save humans over animals, young over old, and more people over fewer. From a report: Since 2016, scientists have posed this scenario to folks around the world through the "Moral Machine," an online platform hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that gauges how humans respond to ethical decisions made by artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the team behind the Moral Machine released responses from more than two million people spanning 233 countries, dependencies and territories. They found a few universal decisions -- for instance, respondents preferred to save a person over an animal, and young people over older people -- but other responses differed by regional cultures and economic status.
The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.
The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.
The major cultural difference there is that the US is almost alone worldwide in that being illegal. In most parts of the world a pedestrian can cross wherever they want, defined crossings just give them a safer place to do so.
Pedestrians shouldn't be walking in the street to begin with.
If they're following the rules, there shouldn't be any scenarios where the vehicle has to make the choice to begin with. Perhaps once folks start getting mowed down, they'll quit walking out in front of traffic. . . .
Don't see too many issues with walking idiots getting flattened by trains do we ? Why ? Because walking in front of moving train = DEATH every time.
If it's an idiot who is walking into moving traffic because their nose is firmly affixed to their smartphone instead of paying attention to their surroundings, I think self driving cars should get achievements based on the number of these types of folks they hit.
Moral of story: DON'T WALK IN THE FUCKING STREET UNLESS YOU'RE AT A CROSSWALK OR TRAFFIC SIGNALS ALLOW FOR IT.
There will NEVER be a set rule of anything like "protect passengers over pedestrians. Or Vice Versa. Because that is not how computers work. And forget about age discrimination, that is just plane stupid. The computer will have a hard enough time deciding if an obstacle is a pedestrian, it won't have that kind of higher logic to estimate the age of the people.
It might not even be able to tell how many people are in the car let alone how many people are currently standing in the middle of the road.
The closest thing that might exist is a rule that states the car may hit smaller obstacles (possibly animals, possibly trash) in the road if swerving might hit something bigger (possibly deer, possibly people).
Instead there will be a complex set of rules such as "stay on roads" and things like that.
AI does not do value judgements. It will have a hard enough time figuring out the environment, it won't have the capacity for the silly ethical questions people keep asking.
Real questions for programming will involve which traffic rules are higher priority than others. For example, staying away from cliffs would probably be very high priority, while slowing down for yellow lights will be lower priority.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The passengers have seatbelts, air bags, and crumple zones to lessen their injuries
The question is usually framed to already take that into account. They way I have heard it is:
Choice 1: Hit pedestrian.
Choice 2: Drive off a cliff and kill the passenger.
It may be an interesting philosophical question, but it has little to do with reality. A scenario like that is almost never going to happen, and even if it did, a human driver would be faced with the same split second dilemma and be no more likely to make the "correct" decision (whatever that is).
Far more important is that the SDC would have much better reaction time, more braking distance, better control of steering, more situational awareness of other traffic, and thus better able to kill no one.
In a crash, self-driving cars should be predictable, rather than coming up with convoluted means to determine which group of pedestrians should be slammed.
Human drivers are erratic enough. No need to make computer-assised drivers to also be erratic.
It's a cute experiment with not exactly surprising results (humans prefer humans over animals - who'd have thought?).
But in the end, like the trolley experiment, it is informative and insightful and a bunch of other +5 mod points buzzwords, but the actual solution for the real world will be made by engineers, not by philosophers, and it will almost certainly not involve a "moral decision" subsystem. The primary effort of a practical AI is in making a decision so quickly that it can still minimize damage. Every CPU cycle wasted on evaluating the data in other ways is silly. It will rely for its decision on whatever data its sensors have already provided, and that data will not be in the shape or form of "there are 3 black people with this age range and these fitness indicators in the car, here are their yearly incomes, family relations and social responsibilities. Outside the car we can choose between the river, average temperature 2 degrees, giving the passengers this table of survival probabilities. Or crowd A, here is a data set of their apparent age, social status and survival probabilities. Or crowd B, here is their data set."
This is how the philosopher imagines the problem would be stated to the AI - or to a human in a survey.
But in reality, the question will be more likely something like: "Collision avoidance subsystem. Here's some noisy sensor data that looks like the road ends over there. A bunch of pixels to the left could be people, number unclear. A bunch of pixels to the right also seem to be people, trajectory prediction subsystem has just given up on them because they're running fuck knows where. Estimated time to impact: 0.5 seconds. You have 1 ms to plot a course somewhere or it doesn't make a difference anymore. Figure something out, I need to adjust the volume on the infotainment system and make the crash warning icon blink."
What we will end up with is some general heuristics, like "don't crash into people if you can avoid it" and then the AI will somehow come up with some result, and it will work ok in most cases in the simulator, and then it will be installed in cars.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In most countries, jaywalking is not even a crime.
Citation needed.
Anyway...
Jaywalking is only called as such if it's a crime. Otherwise it's called "crossing the road". So let's focus on where it indeed is illegal to cross the road wherever you feel like.
Jaywalking was always a tricky thing. There are many variables to consider.
Is it okay to cross a road through an unmarked location, if the road is empty for hundreds of yards either way or with no car in sight?
Is it okay to play IRL Frogger in a busy intersection in the middle of the city?
Personally, I am a strong supporter of (enforcing) heavy fines in case of jaywalking anywhere within a city or town's borders, with the exception of single-lane, one-way streets with speed bumpers or speed limit below 15 mph. The reason for this is my belief that a civilized society is based on respecting the "small rules": no littering, no jaywalking, no unruly behavior, no making a lot of noise, you know, common sense things.
I'm from a country where jaywalking is punished... in theory. In practice, nobody gives a flying fuck, and as a result I stay at the red light with my little kids and everyone else just jaywalks, so I struggle to properly educate my kids to be civilized because everyone else shows them, through their apish behavior, that their dad is an idiot for following simple common sense rules. Am I an idiot for teaching my kids a civilized rule?
In the past I used to work as a camera man for a local branch of a country-wide private TV channel. One of my tasks was to document all major incidents for the local police, as at the time they did not have their own camera man. I have documented car accidents, fires, demolitions gone wrong, suicides, homicides, pretty much anything with victims (be they wounded or killed). I've seen fatal effects of jaywalking, very closely and from a wide variety of angles. People who jaywalk have no fucking clue. I know exactly what I am keeping my kids away from, and I cringe every time I see parents dragging their kids across the road, in a hurry, because cars are coming with 30-40 mph. There was a case from back then where a parent with two kids jaywalked, one of the kids dropped his toy and pulled his hand from his father's, ran back to pick it up and was run over by a car. The other kid go scared and ran the other way, across the middle of the road and got hit by another car. The parent was unscathed but ended up with one dead child and another crippled for life. All because he decided not to wait for 30 more seconds.
So yeah, it doesn't matter if jaywalking is a crime. Before it being a crime, it's a common sense rule. It became a crime because people lack common sense, so it needs to be hammered into their thick skulls with fines and such.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)