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The car driving example is bad IMHO. Because you actually want to encode certain law breaking qualities into them. In particular if it's on a highway and everyo

The car driving example is bad IMHO. Because you actually want to encode certain law breaking qualities into them. In particular if it's on a highway and everyone around you is going 10 kmh above the speed limit and yet the car isnt (unless it's encoded into software) then this will actually jeopardize the security of the whole system. So the right thing to do would be to break the law, but breaking the law is a wrong thing, and so on.

ozmbie 11y ago
You can still be a horrible driver obeying the law.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  That Google car which hit the city bus "should have" changed lanes immediately (if the coast was clear, and if we're just talking reaction instead of having the human sort of prescience to slow down to allow the bus to leave the stop) without using its blinker for a sufficient amount of time. I think the guy has a point, somewhat. What about a car that has a choice to hit a person or a crowd and nothing in between? Maybe I'm using a bad example, but I do believe that there are situations when the only choices involve breaking the law, and I do believe that someday robots will be in those situations. Those situations are not by any standard the norm, but they do exist.
  - mizzao 11y ago
    That was instantiated a while ago as the trolley problem [1], and there's renewed interest in variants of it for self-driving cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
chrismcb 11y ago
In some places the law says to drive in a reasonable and prudent manner. Driving above the speed limit is only evidence that the driver is speeding, but is not necessarily illegal.
mizzao 11y ago
The motto of my alma mater is "leges sine moribus vanae" --- laws without morals are useless. Laws are just a codification of a moral system. But it is an imperfect one, and you can't enforce morality in the form of laws. Humans are free to be unscrupulous and skirt around the law or break it, but it's even worse for AI, because there is no innate compass pointing it toward something being good or bad.

ozmbie 11y ago

You can still be a horrible driver obeying the law.

fapjacks 11y ago
That Google car which hit the city bus "should have" changed lanes immediately (if the coast was clear, and if we're just talking reaction instead of having the human sort of prescience to slow down to allow the bus to leave the stop) without using its blinker for a sufficient amount of time. I think the guy has a point, somewhat. What about a car that has a choice to hit a person or a crowd and nothing in between? Maybe I'm using a bad example, but I do believe that there are situations when the only choices involve breaking the law, and I do believe that someday robots will be in those situations. Those situations are not by any standard the norm, but they do exist.
- mizzao 11y ago
  That was instantiated a while ago as the trolley problem [1], and there's renewed interest in variants of it for self-driving cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

chrismcb 11y ago

In some places the law says to drive in a reasonable and prudent manner. Driving above the speed limit is only evidence that the driver is speeding, but is not necessarily illegal.

mizzao 11y ago

The motto of my alma mater is "leges sine moribus vanae" --- laws without morals are useless. Laws are just a codification of a moral system. But it is an imperfect one, and you can't enforce morality in the form of laws. Humans are free to be unscrupulous and skirt around the law or break it, but it's even worse for AI, because there is no innate compass pointing it toward something being good or bad.