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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.
A self driving car should protect its passengers first or they wouldn't sell. Who would willingly ride in a vehicle that would intentionally sacrifice their life for any reason?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The car should swerve and wipe out as many ANONYMOUS COWARDS as possible.
There is no such "choice" that will ever be relevant.. The car should maintain itself in proscribed places of travel. If a pedestrian runs out in the street, it should apply the brakes and attempt to come to a stop as quickly as possible. This makes it so either the car will stop in time and the pedestrian will be fine, or the speed of impact will be minimized and so the pedestrian will receive less damage all while not setting off a chain reaction that could result in worse outcomes for someone else.
exactly. The reality is this is an extreme fringe case that almost never occurs (I doubt any person that has made a decision to die in a car to save a pedestrian did so thinking they would die). A self driving car is about removing human errors not about making moral judgements, What it should be doing is simply doing its best to avoid or lesson the impact while not risking the lives of its passengers. It doesn't have to make any decisions about who dies, it just follows the road rules and does what it can to avoid or lesson the impact of an accident.
ACs should be banned...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You never know for certain that a given course of action will cause a fatality. When you're driving, you try to avoid accident. Self-driving cars will do the same. They'll compute the odds of an accident for all options and select the one with the lowest odds. It may be just a fraction of a percent less likely, but it will take that.
There are about 1 billion cars in the world. Assuming each is driven just 1,000 miles a year, that is at least once a year such a situation occurs.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
thats but a start
Are the pedestrians paying attention to their surroundings or walking (or bicycling) while fixated on their phones? The latter group is going to end up as Darwin Award winners at some point anyway... (And, yes, I have seen people riding a bike while staring at their smartphone.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
nazi >> socialist >> hillary good job
No questionnaire can resolve this problem.
Cars must prioritize the safety of its occupants over everything else. If they do not, then people can murder others through machine logic without any hacking at all. Additionally, no computer will ever be advanced enough to know that the next decision it makes will be better or worse than just default saving it's occupants.
It is also immoral to evaluate lives based on worthless criteria like age, gender, political, racial, class, or religious ideology.
Just imagine a terrible scenario where a toddler running across a busy high speed road, every other car will prioritize the life of the toddler and potential mass murder everyone else riding in the cars in an attempt to save the toddler. A machine will never be able to predict what every other object around it is going to do in response to the decisions it makes.
Keep it simple as possible... object in path... hit the brakes... don't calculate the life values of the occupants vs road hazards. Each car behind them will do a much better job avoiding a massive catastrophe as cars try to dodge an erratic human that could be drunk, attempting suicide, acting stupid, losing their balance or falling off their bikes, scooters, or skateboards near traffic.
Car stays on road and uses brakes, One and DONE! Anything else will turn into an epic shit-show from time to time where a lot of people die in a massive logical unforeseen circumstance.
Really, its a click bait question. An automated car seeing a pedestrian it may collide with with will brake as hard as possible while avoiding other obstacles and staying in its prescribed lane. The chances of this happening as well as the car having to swerve into an obstacle that would also injure the driver is so small as to be irrelevant noise.
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Trolley problems fail rigor because they make a critical assumption, an artificial intelligence is smart enough that it knows the results of two choices each with negative outcomes but is somehow not smart enough to have avoided that situation to begin with. An AI developer who is trying to produce the safest AI system possible is prioritizing the likely cases first and attempting to produce the best reaction in your typical crash. Nobody in development is concerned about the situation where you have a car speeding down a narrow road where a pedestrian steps out at just the right time and place where the only cause of actions is to crash into them or crash into a power pole. That situation is rare and shouldn't be optimized yet.
Let's say that we're worried about optimizing that situation now and we somehow have omniscient AI that still runs into this situation. Now our problem is probabilities. What's the probability that the pedestrian will survive jump out of the road in time and no crash will happen? What's the probability that the pedestrian will die from the crash? What's the probability that the passenger will die when if we swerve into the light pole? Who is going to be harmed by that falling light pole?
I'm always surprised at how many people think crossing the road somewhere without lights or a designated pedestrian crossing is "jaywalking". How would one legally get from one side of the road to the other when in the countryside without a crossing in sight?!
Unless I'm the passenger.
Adam Ruins Everything -- Why Jaywalking Is A Crime
Thomas Jefferson raped his slaves and sold off his own children into slavery. Fuck him.
Thomas Jefferson is also dead, please stop advocating necrophilia.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
If it's the American countryside, who walks? :D
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
It's illegal in many European countries, but they also have better pedestrian and cycling infrastructure to compensate for this.
Glad to know that NYC (and Boston, probably) has a large cultural distance from the rest of the US. Any place that's not tolerant of jaywalking isn't worth living in, since it puts the needs of steel sensory deprivation bubbles ahead of human needs...
"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."
If my kids are in the car then save them, mow down the pedestrians. If my kids are in front of the car then save them, slam me into a tree or whatever. Drive like I would.
Jaywalking is a derogatory term employed to prevent dissent against automotive laws passing when they were not in the interest of pedestrians. It worked. It is a made up fake thing that does not exist. It will be a funny, creepy piece of trivia once we all emerge from this current insanity.
Lookup the history of jaywalking. People were in absolute revolt but it somehow got got rammed down thier throat anyway.
How about making sure the only person in harm's way is the one that chose to let a computer drive in their place?
and when the sensors mess-up and class an kid as safe to run over Debris??
What if the pedestrian is in the road because they were ejected from another vehicle in a crash. Still feel justified in plowing through them?
What if terrorists are jumping in front of self-driving cars in the road. Should your car always crash anyway just in case?
The real question is why we should settle for some crap self-driving car design that uses RNG to decide whether or not to ram pedestrians or crash and burn? I should hope we can do better than that.
The US is a nation composed largely of immigrants and their offspring, many who have arrived comparatively recently. In many cases they came not because it was convenient (getting to the US from Poland or Italy, for example, was not "convenient" before air travel - esp. for poor people) or because it was easy or because it was low risk. They subjected themselves to substantial risk, expense, and inconvenience to make the trip and survive in the US.
These immigrants, of course, left behind those that didn't have the same drive or interest in creating a better situation for themselves and their families. It would not be surprising that those who had the gumption to better themselves rather than sacrifice themselves for the "common good" would be looking out for themselves and their families more strongly than those that lacked such gumption and remained behind.
As well, the US has historically been one of the most diverse populations in the world (due to the source of our population) so the tribal "common good" notion is probably unsurprisingly much stronger than in monocultures like Japan or most of the Nordic countries.
The US seems to have done pretty well - esp. in light of having to deal with its very diverse population.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
We all know that whether the car decides to hit a jaywalker or not will depend on several variables:
1) Who is more likely to win a multi-million verdict in a Civil Suit: a jay-walker or the passenger?
2) Will drivers buy the AI software if it will decide to kill their entire families?
3) How well the engineers work on a feature (deciding whether to hit jaywalker or kill passenger by driving off cliff?) that is much less likely to be used in the real world then every other feature of the AI?
And variable 4) Moral philosophers have written a paper on this based on millions of data points from an online quiz, is not on the list.
The survey presented assumes brake FAILURE in the scenarios. I.e., the brakes are applied but they fail to stop the car as expected.
In such a scenario, the software is presented with several inputs including at least:
1. In spite of applying the brakes the car is not slowing down quickly enough (perhaps it might not even be because of a defect in the car -- perhaps a leaking tanker truck full of vegetable oil had passed ahead of the vehicle you are in just 20 seconds earlier).
2. The car is approaching an unanticipated barrier (perhaps related to construction or perhaps as the result of some sort of localized natural or man-made disaster) at a high speed that, if impacted, will likely kill everyone in the car.
3. The software detects what it thinks is a "passenger safe" path around the barrier, but detects that a living entity (a dog or a person perhaps) is occupying that space and that the living entity will likely be killed if that path is taken (of course, if it's the vegetable oil case, the software might not know enough - do the weird road conditions also exist on the swerving path which might make steering ineffective?).
The software has to do SOMETHING predictable in this case - even if it is just to throw up its hands and reboot! Any unpredictable response to fixed inputs in this area should be caught in review before the product alpha. So, what is the requirement in this scenario?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
That's naive -- the software has to do something here, it receives a bunch of inputs and analyzes a bunch of possible outcomes and somehow has to score them to decide to take an action (including "do nothing" which is, in itself, an action).
For example, surely a car should swerve to avoid a car that has run a red light if that will avoid a collision of any sort rather than just run into the red light runner and likely kill or seriously injure individuals in both cars. But, what if swerving would mean impacting a vehicle in the cross street (in another lane) that did follow the law and stop at the red light and this impact, due to being off center, presents a much smaller but still significant likelihood of death -- but to the completely uninvolved driver of the lawfully stopped car?
An alert driver will actually make a decision in such cases -- it may not be the right one and it may not be made quickly enough and most people probably don't know how they would really make such a split second decision. Our brains are not available for code review. Hopefully the self driving software/dataset and design has been reviewed and the reviewer has to determine if the code/dataset meets the requirements in this case - a SEGV probably isn't acceptable for example. If nothing else, fuzzing tests during development would result in situations like this and require a human (perhaps with a lawyer stitched to their side) to decide if the outcome was acceptable.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
So, a self driving car in a case like this (or any of the millions of other similar cases) should never take evasive action - just smash into the pedestrians or barrier in front of it? Or, do you suggest that self-driving cars should ignore bicyclists and pedestrians (as they are both light and probably won't kill any passengers in the car) when evaluating evasive maneuvers necessary to "save the car and the passengers"?
Consider how you would write the requirements spec or testing criteria for self driving software. Would you just identify desired actions in such cases as "Undefined"? If not, what would you define.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
However, there are laws against some sorts of crossing between intersections in some areas. Where I live, there is one law that says that if you are within X feet (I don't recall what X is) of a controlled intersection, it is illegal to cross except at such an intersection.
Also, there are places where "no pedestrian" signs prohibit pedestrians so crossing a road from/to one of those areas is also illegal.
But, yes, where I live, you're certainly free to cross an undivided road on foot if there's no intersection within miles and no sign prohibiting it!
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
....For 2 reasons.
1) By being able to operate a vehicle orders of magnitude faster and with far more information than a human, the chance that the car will ever even get into a situation were this decision would have to be made is very, very unlikely.
2) If it gets into this situation where stopping entirely w/o injuring anyone is off the table, then the car will have so little time to react that making a decision to kill one group or the other and acting on it is a pointless exercise.
Also, there are possible new twists that people haven't even considered that will likely make this argument completely moot. Since the cars will have a far better understanding of their immediate vicinity, you can build in external air bags that can fire moments before any impact to further protect occupants and pedestrians. Perhaps you will want cars to be programed to steer directly at unavoidable pedestrians in order to center them in an air bag pillow.
The trolley problem is an interesting exerciser for ethics 101 students, but far to simplistic and contrived to be worth of real debate or consideration.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
... know that they have to set priorities. You can spend time on X or on Y but not on both. So you decide what has more benefits, working on X or on Y, and that's what you do.
Working to make cars more secure is highly beneficial. Working on deciding moral dilemmas, whether to kill one person or another, isn't beneficial in any way. One person dead, one way or another. So spending developer time on this kind of question is absolutely pointless until these cars are 100% safe, and then it is even more pointless.
How often has anyone ever been in a situation where they have to make such a choice? Once every trillion miles driven?
Well, just American drivers alone drive 3.2 trillion miles a year, so it would be a multiple-times-per-year event in the US alone, using that as the rate per mile. Globally the frequency would be much higher since the US accounts for only about 2% of pedestrian fatalities worldwide (about 5000 out of over a quarter million).
This is kind of a semi-broken way of thinking about this; yes the rate at which this situation happens is very low and likely to be lower for self-driving cars. But its a black swan event, a very rare event that you really can't leave out of your plans, because when it does happen it spells "crisis".
Anyhow, exactly the same kind of ethical calculations apply to car vs. car accidents, which are much more common. Those very often involve trading off the value of lives. The real problem is asking people what they *think* they'd do in a hypothetical situation doesn't tell you what would be right, even they are accurate in their predictions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
These maneuvers are not necessarily "insane" - but there may be something in the "escape path" with some probability that it is each of (a) human, (b) domestic pet, (c) small wild rodent, (d) a patch of flowers in front of a business or home.
It sounds like you are proposing that if p(a) = 0.0000001 and p(d) = 99.999 you would still elect to kill the pedestrian? Most humans would not make that decision -- including humans on the jury for the civil case the pedestrian's widow and children file.
[Yes I know that it's quite possible that there is a small wild rodent or a small child hidden in the flowerbed so it's a little more complicated than I make it out to be.]
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Not really. The term jay-walker descended from jay-driver. People who would refuse to abide by the rules of the road when operating motor vehicles or horse-drawn carriages. Jay-walker was applied to people who had no 'sidewalk etiquette' as well as those who wandered into the roadway. Jay-driver dropped out of use as motor vehicle faux pas began to be referred to by official violation names. Whereas jay-walking remained in our lexicon specifically because the laws were slow to codify pedestrian misbehavior.
The Adam Ruins Everything video is just one of a number of politicized anti-car rants
Have gnu, will travel.
I would never expect a self driving car to swerve to avoid contact. Computer vision is still very dumb, and it could see a sheet as a wall and decide to swerve into the crowd behind the sheet thinking it was causing less harm. Plus the false positive causing random swerving around the road when a cloud goes over the road. Plus it's likely to cause a bigger accident when it hits the gravel edge and flips the car. If anything get longer range sensors and preempt the conditions ahead and adjust the speed accordingly. This still isn't ideal as it'll mean the driverless cars randomly slow down for no apparent reason.
You do not need AI for that. Just a Muslim Jihadist in a Truck of Peace.
Should AI driven cars in muslim countries be programmed to swerve to run over pedestrians if a koran is in the road?
A machine shouldn't "prioritize" the passengers or the pedestrian's lives, per se... it should prioritize driving safely. Full stop. Nothing more and nothing less. Driving safely entails being aware enough of one's surroundings and driving at an appropriate speed that one is able to safely stop in a hypothetical reduced visibility scenario that the likelihood of something that is genuinely unexpected arising should be statistically negligible. Any sense of "priotizing" would be pointless, and would only lead to people blaming whatever convenient target they can find if or when things don't go there way. If the car was objectively driving safely, then any debates on what the car "should have done" are rendered moot... the car obeys the law, and does its best to drive in a safe manner. Any accident it therefore gets into with a vehicle that is being driven by a human would therefore be statistically more likely to be the human's fault.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Trolley problems are interesting for the average person to discuss with each other.
To an engineer they are engineering failures. And I don't know about you personally, maybe you're some daredevil alcoholic behind the wheel, but I've yet to ever encounter a life or death situation for anyone while driving. That includes ever even seeing anyone else in one. Considering self driving cars are supposed to be safer than human drivers to begin with, not only is even getting into a stupid trolley problem situation a failure for a self driving car to begin with, it's also hard to imagine how the ever loving hell it would happen without some third option of "kill no one".
So please, please stop posting this stupid story that, in effect, never changes at all. This isn't news for nerds, it's clickbait discussion topics for mouth breathers.
The algorithm is probably quickly calculating a tree of possibilities and taking the min(sum(damages)). Would the damages be more affecting the passengers, as long as overall there are less damages than hurting the pedestrians, the algo should take that path.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
In a crash, obey road rules as much as practical. Normally, this means braking and staying in your lane. Stray outside your lane only if it won't kill someone.
Further, AI today is generally too clever by half. I don't think its capable of making any such decisions.
and when the sensors mess-up and class an kid as safe to run over Debris??
First of all, the whole road would have to be covered in something as big as the kid to even think about running over an obstacle.
Secondly, very probably any software would simply stop if the road was filled with debris that large, or at worst run around.
Thirdly, moving "debris" would rate a higher priority not to go over compared to static obstacles.
Fourthly, don't set your damn baby down on the road or Grandma will never even see it and the way those old people car shocks are she wouldn't even feel the bump going over it.
The kid is a lot safer in a world of self driving cars that can see exactly what is on the road WAY better than any human can, and have better reflexes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The highest responding age group was 20 year olds, and largest number of respondents (close to 40% respondents) fell into the $0-$5,000 annual income bracket, so people not with means to purchase a self-driving car, hence responding to the questions from "what others should do" perspective, not "what I would do". No surprise, people are usually very altruistic when asked what others should do. If the question was "what should your car do" or "what should your loved one's car do", the answers would be different.
They'll compute the odds of an accident for all options and select the one with the lowest odds
No, if they did that. they would move at the lowest possible speed - walking pace (or less). And who would use them, then?
The first priority of an autonomous vehicle will be customer service. To get the paying passenger (or owner) to where they want to be while staying within the pre-defined rules of the road: speed, traffic lights, etc.
There will not ever be an AV that can compute the age of pedestrians and single-out the oldest ones to preferentially collide with, if a collision is inevitable. Worse than that, to do so would be to target a vulnerable group - one with less survivability than (say) a 25 year-old in good health. And as soon as a vehicle made any autonomous life-or-death determination, the lawsuits would bury it, its owner, its makers, its designers and anyone else who was involved, for years.
The only thing that prevents people from getting embroiled in these sorts of moral decisions is our recognised fallability. Once we expect that machines will be less fallible, they'd better be dam' well perfect. The AV makers will have a hell of a job trying to walk back from the ignorant media's view that AVs will be "perfect" drivers. Studies like this one, which imply they will be are doing nobody a service.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The problem with self driving is, when you have a machine that you are programming with vastly enhanced capabilities to that of a human, then it stands to reason that the vehicle be that much more safe. If developers have programmed a car to drive without considering every possible scenario that their car may find itself in then they have been negligent. Maybe one day when 99% of cars are automated, then they will have a chance to be safer simply by driving 'slightly better than' a human and consistency and homogeneity will bring safety, but for today the assumption with automated cars must be that they will need to navigate roads with a grate many humans that do a great many unpredictable things. To ignore that an automated vehicle will need to drive with humans and not prepare for it is negligent.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is a false choice. Any code added to address this non-issue is going to make the overall system LESS safe for everyone, as it will add complexity, and the likelihood of failure.
The difference is that with software, a car can know instantly whether the lane on either side is open, and can have shorter reaction time than a person (at least one would hope), which significantly changes the odds when it comes to swerving.
Also, given enough CPU horsepower thrown at the problem, a car could also ostensibly calculate the correct angle at which to sideswipe a guard rail or parked car such that the car slows down faster than the brakes would be capable of slowing it down, but without flipping the car or causing other problems. Choosing between the life of the person in the car and the life of a pedestrian is nonsensical, but choosing between killing a pedestrian and causing property damage is not nearly as crazy.
Then again, pedestrian airbags are a thing, and making those mandatory, coupled with faster reaction time, would probably make even that question largely moot.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
From the very foundation that manages the estate of Thomas Jefferson at the home he built, Monticello, including his descendants, both black and white:
“Though enslaved, Sally Hemings helped shape her life and the lives of her children, who got an almost 50-year head start on emancipation, escaping the system that had engulfed their ancestors and millions of others. Whatever we may feel about it today, this was important to her.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed, 2017
I don't think Thomas Jefferson was quite as evil as you make him out to be. He seems to have been more interested in keeping his relationship with Sally Hemings secret, rather than in keeping anyone a slave. I also challenge you to produce a record of Jefferson selling any of his children with Sally Hemings, or a record of any of Sally's children being abused. Jefferson went out of his way to provide Sally with a private adjoining bedroom with his own. This woman had unfettered access to Jefferson. She could have easily killed him in his sleep, for decades, but she didn't. They also fell in love while in France, where mixed race relationships where no big deal.
It's also not fair to use modern values to judge those from a different culture and era. If you have references to paint a clear picture of Jefferson as someone who was truly evil, rather than someone who was trying to avoid persecution for a forbidden love, I'd love to see them.
Jefferson did leave clear instructions that all his slaves were to be freed, but I don't think this happened until after he died. I do love history, but I do not claim to be knowledgeable about Jefferson, although I have visited his home.
If you want an example of evil in the founding fathers of US history - look at Alexander Hamilton. That SOB used anonymous news articles and stories to libel and belittle Aaron Burr for decades, a rather competent military man who went on to become vice president. Both Burr and Jefferson were not terribly fond of Hamilton's Federalist agenda, which has issues reverberating in American politics to this day.
Burr eventually got tired of Hamilton's shit and challenged him to a duel, which was accepted. Hamilton, being inept with a pistol, his few competencies being running his mouth and flinging ink with his pen, lost the duel and died. A fitting end for an Anonymous Coward.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Reference please.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
The software applies reverse-biased voltage and/or turns on the electric emergency brake so that the rear wheels lock up, then turns the steering wheel hard to the left, then waits for the tail to swing around, and finally applies power to all four wheels at full throttle until it slows down sufficiently to avoid hitting either the pedestrian or the barrier.
What? That's insane? So is any scenario involving failure of the hydraulic brakes while driving towards a barrier at sufficient speed to be unable to slow down enough via regenerative braking to avoid killing the jaywalking pedestrian who stepped out early enough that you otherwise would have been able to stop, but late enough that you were unable to do so because of a leaking tanker truck filled with vegetable oil that somehow got just enough oil on the road to kill your brakes, yet not quite enough to result in complete loss of control over steering. I mean, you might as well have the pre-programmed solution be utterly spectacular, because you're never going to get a chance to test it in the real world anyway.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I also forgot my original username and password from the early days of Slashdot, and I have no record of an email I got, as a result of some early postings, asking me to participate in some new fangled moderation system they were working on. The email was from some dude named Rob Malda. I was in grad school at the time and too busy to take any of this shit seriously, so I kind of blew it off. Sorry Rob.
Anyway, your excuse for remaining an AC is lame, and I'd hit you with my cane, if I could see where you are.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Also, given enough CPU horsepower thrown at the problem, a car could also ostensibly calculate the correct angle at which to sideswipe a guard rail or parked car such that the car slows down faster than the brakes would be capable of slowing it down, but without flipping the car or causing other problems.
Man you seem intent on making this as complex as possible. If you have so much CPU power and knowledge of the surroundings then how the fuck did it end up in a life and death situation where it would need to take such action. The whole premise of the question is idiotic, any sufficiently advanced enough system will be able to avoid the scenario in the first place, in the meantime the only sane approach is to program the system to follow the road rules to minimise the risk.
If a car has enough AI to decide who lives or dies, then it's a waste of AI. Put the AI in some sort of chassis than can get in and out of a car, drive when asked, and do other useful things, like help me learn a foreign language and play the piano:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
EULA will not hold up in criminal court but the said part is that it will take some very bad like an auto drive trunk hitting a school bus to get there. So then in criminal court will the power to look past NDA's / EULA and be able to hold someone at fault even if they have go after a big list of subcontractors
I'd mod you up for this if I could ...
Can you imagine the raucous, fruit-throwing shouting match debates between citizens, discussing important issues during the foundation of western civilization, at Pnyx, while some citizen tried to conceal their identity with a hood and false voice?
I'd love to hear their laughter and derision, and watch the crows pick all the tossed lunches and partially rotten fruit off the ground in the aftermath.
American Politics is boring, and Americans tend to take themselves far too seriously. If you don't have the courage to put your own foot in your mouth and eat a bit of crow now and then, then just shut the fuck up and quit pretending not to be a lying shill.
Entertaining politics of and for non-cowards
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Answer: Save the pedestrian, kill the passengers.
Reason: I don't own one, hence the chance of being the pedestrian in the scenario is higher.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How would one legally get from one side of the road to the other when in the countryside without a crossing in sight?!
I know Americans that would take their car.
The Stabinator will be programmed with your preferences. Remember, we're not the bad guys. You are. -Stabco
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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
If a car is programmed to kill its passengers to save pedestrians under some rare circumstances, it will far more commonly kill passengers pointlessly, due to false positives.
Protect the most endangered species first. Humans last
Yes. As is apparent, I am NOT a fan of on-line anonymity. I truly consider speech that you can't be personally held accountable for to be the words of true cowards who have nothing of value to contribute to society. I will continue to rail against it.
I like anonymity, and use it in most circumstances except here. I don't mind that someone who sees something that I've written can see who I am, what I mind is someone else can look me up and find out what I've written.
If you have so much CPU power and knowledge of the surroundings then how the fuck did it end up in a life and death situation where it would need to take such action
Because of other people doing stupid things, like running a red light, as in the GP example.
But its a black swan event, a very rare event that you really can't leave out of your plans, because when it does happen it spells "crisis".
Killing a few people in traffic a couple of times a year is hardly a crisis.
Jaywalking is not a crime in most countries. Pedestrians typically have right of way over cars. That may sound odd to Americans who haven't traveled, but most countries don't have a word for jaywalking because it is just walking.
So tolerance of jaywalking comes from it being fine in most places.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The UK has no law outlawing jaywalking. The history of the law, passed as a result of pressure from motor car manufacturers to allow them to blame pedestrians for accidents, is unimpressive. It has an alarming tendency to be used in a racist way by police e.g.
https://www.economist.com/demo...
makes the point more strongly. Indeed the underlying assumption that pedestrians aren't capable of rational thought is extraordinary. The fact that it is the law in ISRAEL is even weirder (a friend got done for it).
if the car is driving itself, it will be questionable about the security problem
...will save itself, killing if needed passengers and pedestrians.
This is a moot point. Self driving cars will never be a reality ever, the reason is not moral or technical it's legal. The person who is in the self driving car will always be legally responsible for everything that happens. So that means if the car malfunctions and kills somebody the "driver" will be prosecuted. Who in their right mind wants to use a self driving car if they can go to jail for using it?
Yes she knew it, and they had a long argument about it before she agreed to go back.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Romania, which, amazingly, is separated from the UK.
I have no idea what the Queen's Highway is.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
That "trillion miles" thing was clearly just a wild guess though. It's probably way more likely.
Have you ever heard of such a situation in a real world situation? The only examples I can think of are in the event of wars and natural disasters where the designers can't really be expected to plan for the situation.
it should always protect the pedestrian.
Q. who has the biggest chance of the least injuries or death?
A. the person in the car.
the places where you would encounter pedestrians normally already have low speed limits, the car should be able to easily avoid hitting the pedestrian while still decreasing the speed enough that in case it crashes into something, the injuries to the passengers will be none to minimal.
but even hitting a pedestrian at 50km/h can result in death or severe injuries.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
If discussion here were more healthy I guess I would take the time to create a user. As it is there's too much political orientend talk, corporate ass lickers and stalkers. AC is the way to go.
How about we just focus on having the car not try to occupy the same space as anything else solid?
Obviously there are those who would and do abuse online anonymity. That said, in today's world where posts are likely to be archived, sorted, and databased forever, legitimate and thoughtful posts may very well need to be anonymous.
It is unacceptable to some of us that there is a database somewhere that says "Paul likes to eat bacon (health risk, raise his insurance rates), likes to work with small teams (no room for required diversity target, don't hire him), and goes fishing on holiday (anti-environment, risk to our reputation).
Anonymity is not always unacceptable hiding. It may be just a desire not to feed the beast.
1) We consider the self-driving car to be a "robot"
2) We consider the willing passengers "part of the robot", as they chose to be there.
Therefore the law ("A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm") only should apply to those parties who didn't consent to having a "robot" interact with them.
Thus... the willing passengers inside the car should be sacrificed.
The real dilemma is which action will incur the least losses to the manufacturer through lawsuits. This is what will be implemented, I've never seen a case of a company placing altruism over profits unless they can virtue signal the altruism to make more profits.
In all these scenarios I would always pick the pedestrians. The passengers in the car are strapped in by seat belts, wrapped in a 5000 lb steel cage, and surrounded by airbags. The pedestrians are protected by a t-shirt and jeans.
Then again if I was in a self-driving car and it swerved to avoid a squirrel by slamming me into a tree. I would probably buy a different car next time.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
A car that prioritizes saving pedestrian lives at the expense of drivers? Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that (see: protesters)...
I don't want ANY machine deciding for me who is going to live or die, that must be MY decision and MY decision ALONE, which is one of the myriad reasons I'd never set foot into any so-called 'self-driving car'. Machines don't care about living things because they are incapable of distinguishing between living beings and inanimate objects. This is one of the many reasons the half-assed 'AI' being used is the wrong approach: mere 'machine learning' isn't good enough, it needs to be able to actually 'think', and we have no idea how that even works.
Working in the trucking industry under DOT regulation, fleets of cargo and power units prescribed by state laws accumulates safety statistics, albeit private numbers. As Director of Safety with 1200 units and 9500 trailers nationwide with thousands of drivers, 70% of all fatals occurred 1/2 hr before or after the hours of sunrise - sunset. Animal .vs. Vehicular accidents where property damage was the result of a driver ' swerve' to avoid an accident overwhelmingly resolved to be driver responsibility finding a lack of attention, asleep at the wheel, medical condition or simply phantom; a lie; a coverup.
There were no human .vs. vehicle damage claims against drivers who saved someone's life by driving over a cliff - so to speak. SO the dynamics established from experience in-fleet with AI technologies specific to each ' brand' or ' application' drive the resultant statistics, philosophy, risk factors and regulation around headless steerage.
Elon with Tesla has steered clear of headless which is a major difference with a distinction that not only recognizes but ingeniously places responsibility where it ultimately rests; on the driver. DOT regulation will follow for headless steerage around the statistics to backup Tesla's stance, safety choices and the fact that legally the driver is ultimately in control and responsible regardless how he elects to do so.
UK total road deaths - about 2,000, or less.
US total road deaths - about 30,000
Therefore, using your figures
UK pedestrian deaths - 400
USA pedestrian deaths 3,600
On the whole therefore banning jaywalking clearly makes it more dangerous to be a pedestrian...
Isn't logic wonderful!
This might be fun to ponder as an ethical hypothetical question, but it lacks all relevance to actual self-driving cars. For this type of programming to come into practical use, there would need to be a situation where: a) something unexpected turned up in the middle of the road b) there is not enough time to brake, but c) there is enough time to steer away, but d) there is no way to steer so well that you avoid an accident completely, and e) the car has good enough sensors and software that it can discriminate between different objects (humans, animals, trees...). I probably do not need to point out that the status of self-driving cars today is at the level that you cannot trust them not to hit road blocks or people crossing the street at the wrong place. There are legitimate ethical questions regarding self-driving cars - is it right to relieve the driver of responsibility, how much better than humans do the computers have to be before they take over, if an accident happens who is responsible (the programmer? the CEO of the car manufacturer?) and so on. This nonsense question about who the car should save is unfortunate because it distracts from the very real issues that autonomous cars face.
America is one of the few countries that even calls it a crime.
Europe doesn't. Europe has stronger government, in many respects, yet is culturally relatively close, and values individual freedom as much as America but places a different balance between freedom from and freedom to.
Notice I do not call one better. It is a different balance, that is all.
That there are journalists and academics who cannot fathom a larger universe than their patch of ground is more troublesome than any finding they produced.
It also renders their findings worthless. Never trust an academic who doesn't understand what they are looking at.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You know, I doubt Thomas Jefferson would disagree. He supported freedom of speech, not freedom from responsibility.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The British Highway Code requires you to drive at a speed that is safe for the prevailing conditions, such that you can stop safely in an emergency such as someone stepping out onto the road, and be able to maintain control of the vehicle at all times.
If a computer can't do that, then what's the use in an automated car?
In that case, there is virtually no situation in which passengers or bystanders is at significant risk. If they were, either control isn't being maintained or the car is travelling too fast to stop safely in an emergency under prevailing conditions.
What's the problem?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Which would be clearly visible in the side camera.
Which would be seen sooner by the computer than by a human, thanks to faster reaction time, and which probably would have been previously detected in previous frames of video, i.e. the computer is more likely to be able to remember that a car is coming.
But when the computer's reaction time is measured in microseconds instead of seconds, there are many situations in which a computer would not need to make a violent swerve in the first place, because it would have two extra seconds in which to brake, start steering, and assess whether that was the right call.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Your comment is fair - however turning it into a personal attack merely shows that you have no ability to accept when you are wrong. That's not a good place to be...
Why did the Koran cross the road? (Awaiting punchlines)
Just another day in Paradise
To you healthy is, "What doesn't offend me". That is the opposite of healthy discussion.
Offense is something the listener/reader creates in their mind, not something given by the speaker/writer. One can choose to be offended at anything. If you choose to be offended and that keeps you from rationally considering what the speaker/writer is saying, then you have kept yourself from having healthy discussion. What you want is an echo chamber where everything you hear fits nicely in a box of your own choosing and makes you feel comfortable with your current views of the world. That is definitely NOT healthy discussion.
Nothing offends me. Ever.
I've told you to stop sucking your own dick. It's nasty.
The AI's job is to #1 obey the laws, #2 prevent an accident and #3 arrive at its destination. In that order specifically. As long as #1 is being followed, it is not liable for any incidents that occur. Hitting a person violates #2 and would prevent #3 At no point will the AI ever make a decision about who dies, it's beyond the scope of it's programming and should always remain so. The reaction is straight forward: Step 1. brake as hard as it can, Step 2. Swerve to avoid if it can do so safely. This is not iRobot where the machine is calculating odds of survival and making a choice based off that, there is no thought process. It is completely pre-programmed reactions.
It's so weird that your'e such a faggoty, child-molesting, cowardly bitch who balls up in the fetal position and sucks his own dick while chanting, "make the bad man stop" instead of being a man and posting under your real name. Loser!
The only person losing their shit is cowardly you sitting in the corner sucking your own dick to afraid to speak as your real name because you are a coward.