7 ms·

The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars

44 points by benbreen 10y ago

gengkev 10y ago
Self-driving cars that have even the slightest hope of considering such questions in split-second situations will, undoubtedly, already be better than any human driver. So when we get to the point where we have to actually ask questions like these, they'll still be an improvement over jerking the wheel in a random direction and praying. By then, perhaps, we will be able to investigate car crashes with the same rigor with which we investigate airplane crashes.
mc32 10y ago
However it works out, on the whole, there will be fewer deaths and injuries with autonomous cars. So, we can try to weight the different scenarios to give one a handicap over another --but this pales in comparison to all the lives saved by having autonomous cars.
- jtlien1 10y ago
  My take on driverless cars is that they should solve a few other problems first. Like our crazy insurance system. I should pay much less for driving on uncrowded rural highways than people who drive in congested cities. And pay by the number of miles driven. And fix the problem with drunken drivers and deer/car collisions. And taxes to pay for roads not on how many miles you drive on which roads using what kind of vehichle. Small cars are subsidizing semis and dump trucks.
  - abrons 10y ago
    Be careful what you wish for, those urban drivers are subsidizing your uncrowded rural highways.
    - bpodgursky 10y ago
      The over-simplistic tax revenue argument that gets thrown around isn't useful. The urban drivers pay tax revenue, which then "subsidizes" rural highways, which then produce... incredibly cheap food. Which is then consumed in... cities. You could stop paying for highways, and then food gets more expensive, and it all evens out. And maybe that would make more sense. But don't trick yourself into thinking the relationship is parasitic.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
  Yet even autonomous cars will kill more people than bicycles, trains, and walking infrastructure. Yes, I know, I know, suburban sprawl, rural communities, etc. But rather than perpetuating car-centric design and the inevitable, though fewer, deaths, maybe we should concentrate on designing walkable, bikeable, liveable cities instead.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I love walking as much as anyone. And I love efficient and convenient mass transit, but I realize that there still is a place for cars. Tokyo, Paris, etc. Very good transit and very walkable, yet cars are still necessary. With autonomous vehicles we can utilize capacity better reducing the number of vehicles necessary to transport a given number of people.
CM30 10y ago
I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article itself points out that other, more normal safety features are being included that lower the risk from accidental collisions and the cars might not be going fast enough for this sort of issue to be a concern in most instances (read, those not involving a motorway or autobahn). And in those cases, well, anyone who might be in the path of such a car in such a situation might be best classed as 'too dumb to live', since high speed roads are not good places for pedestrian crossings or playing chicken. But in the 0.00001% of cases which this issue might be a thing, then they should honestly just value the driver and passengers. Like every other tool and item in human society,for good or bad alike.
- ilostmykeys 10y ago
  "Me first" is pretty dumb in the global sense. Cooperative (nit me first) games are the way to greater benefit for everyone.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > "Me first" is pretty dumb in the global sense. Cooperative (nit me first) games are the way to greater benefit for everyone. Only for games with multiple iterations. In addition, "Me first" strategies often create something fairly close to optimal for a lot of cases--we call them "greedy" algorithms for a reason.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  I agree. If doing so makes people more willing to adopt driverless cars, it may save more lives. However, if the person would only be injured, it should prefer that to someone else's death (as the person himself would be legally obligated to do.)
  - 10y ago
blazespin 10y ago
Talk about pointless edge case. It's so incredibly rare, you can just have the car protect the passenger and that's fine. My biggest concern about self driving cars is the ability to mess with the image recognition software. How hard would it be to flash a piece of material at a lidar/radar and confuse it that so much that it either crashes / goes into DOS / or thinks a minivan full of babies is cruising down the road towards it.
venomsnake 10y ago
double getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead){ return speedAtWhichStoppingDistanceIs (clear_road_ahead/3); } enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead)); Engineering solved morality once again.
- mcbits 10y ago
  try { enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead)); } catch (CatastrophicBrakeFailureException ex) { // ??? }
  - hawkice 10y ago
    This is probably the perfect example of why I find these discussions massive wastes of time. If there is a catastrophic brake failure currently, with human drivers, it isn't seen as a deep philosophical issue. I have absolutely no clue why this changes because the car is operated differently.
  - TillE 10y ago
    Sudden brake failure on a properly maintained car is vanishingly unlikely. Having it occur the instant you need to slam the brakes for a life-or-death intervention will basically never happen. For the vast, vast majority of catastrophic failures, the basic procedure of pulling over and stopping the car will be absolutely fine.
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    turnOffEngine(); The engine turned off can be used very effectively as a brake.
    - sonthonax 10y ago
      Should an electric engine also literally be able to 'reverse the polarity' as well?
    - mcbits 10y ago
      Better catch EngineControlException. Oh, and TireShotBySniperException. Brake failure is just an example. There dozens of sensors and subsystems with innumerable combinations that can fail and put the vehicle in a state where some kind of collision is unavoidable. It will have to decide what to do. Humans end up calling randomPanic() at some point, so maybe that's what the vehicle should do to avoid accusations that it "intentionally" harmed one party or another.
CM30 10y ago
On another note, it could also be interesting to think about what the legal situation could be with a situation like this. If a driverless car prioritises the owner/passengers, then I can see a few court cases where the families of people killed by one would want to sue the manufacturer over it. And if it works the other way around, it could be the families of the passengers suing the company instead. At which point we then have to let the court system decide how a driverless car should act in the case of this problem. And then it gets even more complicated, since different countries and states (and even towns) might come to different conclusions here. Does your car now need to know how to act in every possible US state and country in the world in case it's taken there and gets into an accident?
- csydas 10y ago
  Legally, it will take awhile for most jurisdictions to catch up to the idea of driverless cars, though in the case of passenger death in the autonomous car, there will probably be some complicated legal waiver about what does and does not constitute fault in the software versus what is just an accident. More likely that naught, there will be federal regulations the US as to how the cars must behave, and states can elect whether or not to simply allow the cars, much like how there are national emissions standards.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
elcct 10y ago
The Amorality of typewriters. Oh wait...
mslot 10y ago
I don't believe that humans take split-second (binary?) decisions based on morality, only survival. Most of the time, people's instinct tells them to get off the road if there are no alternatives. This actually seems like a reasonable decision to increase the chance of survival. Self-driving cars should probably do the same.
PantaloonFlames 10y ago
All this hang-wringing about the decision a driverless car will make when faced with the trolley problem is pointless. Driverless cars will result in a MASSIVE reduction in deaths of drivers and passengers, a MASSIVE reduction in harm to human pedestrians and non-drivers and to the environment. Driverless cars do not look at their cell phones. Driverless cars do not drive drunk. Driverless cars are not in a hurry, not distracted, not upset by what their boss just said, or by the kids in the back seat. Driverless cars will not err as humans do. Driverless cars will reduce the incidence of "trolley problems" incurred in practice by 2 orders of magnitude or more. Driverless TRUCKS will allow cargo to travel at night, when humans are less likely to be on the road. Which will reduce congestion, which will allow people to get where they're going on time when they ARE on the road. Driverless trucks will KNOW when a car is behind them; there is no "blind spot", ever. And driverless trucks will signal to the car behind them, "you are too close, back off". And it will happen, and no one will get upset about it. Driverless cars will not accelerate pointlessly from a stoplight, only to slam on the brakes a second later, because they did not see the line of traffic ahead. Driverless cars will not engage in petty competition with other driverless cars. Driverless cars will be like Buddhist drivers - steady as she goes, no stress, no drama. That means less fuel consumption, less road wear, less environmental damage. Driverless cars will also give mobility to those who are unable to drive - people with eyesight challenges or physical coordination challenges. Anyone fretting about the ethics of driverless cars along the lines of this article is completely, utterly, radically missing the forest for the trees. Driverless cars will be a huge boon for modern society. (Don't get me started about the idiocy of the statement that "car sales are engineered to bring safety features to the expensive models". Has this author completely missed the lessons of capitalism? )
- themartorana 10y ago
  This. Every time I hear questioning of driverless cars, this. The moral win is at a macro level, and is so enormous as to render anyone's concerns about nearly-zero-percent-likely scenarios completely uninteresting at best, and actually harmful by slowing the adoption of driverless cars at worst. There is almost zero percent likelihood that the scenarios presented in this article would happen (as pointed out everywhere here). But just for shits and grins, it doesn't matter what decision is made at the macro level. Because while n people may die in a very unlikely scenario, where n is the maximum possible deaths in that scenario, the total number of lives saved in that same moment by driverless cars renders all moral questioning moot. Edit: to boot, driverless cars aren't amoral. The decision tree in these unlikely scenarios have already been programmed in by humans. It's their morality that you find yourself governed by.
lifeformed 10y ago
I don't get the controversy about this at all. Prioritize the passengers lives every time. If someone is walking around on the road, then they are putting themselves in an extremely dangerous position. Whether or not they deserve or intend it, they are the ones with the responsibility to not be there. It's unfortunate if they die, but it's their "fault", at least more than the passenger's fault. If a bunch of kid runs down a highway into incoming traffic, are all the cars supposed to kill themselves? Sure, people will accidentally be stuck in the middle of a road. If you're unlucky enough to be in that situation, that sucks, but you can't ask someone else to die for it. Accidents are a part of reality, we should minimize unfairness rather than minimize loss of utility. One person getting unlucky and dying is bad, but one person dying because someone else got unlucky is worse, in my opinion. That's twice the unfairness.
tim333 10y ago
>At some point, my car is going to have a choice between hitting a semi and hitting a minivan full of kids. No it's not. I doubt that has ever come up with a human driver and probably won't with autonomous drivers either. If it does both humans or robots will probably think oh shit, hit the brakes and hope for the best.
ommunist 10y ago
Technology is immoral. Business is immoral. These things cannot be put into the moral dimension. Only humans are moral beings (fortunately that can be fixed). Essentially, modern planes are 100% self-driving, and look, there are much less human lives spared in plane accidents than in car accidents every year.
calsy 10y ago
I always think of these things as tech dreams vs reality. No matter the publicity, no matter the hype, the reality is you will need to change the perception of a global public that have been driving cars for a century. You need to convince the world that it is safe to ride in a car not controlled by a person. I cant see this happening for sometime, decades even. Not only that but driverless cars will disrupt government revenue streams, the workforce, law enforcement etc. every industry will be affected and I don't think people are just going to welcome these changes with open arms. Sure the tech news is gushing with praise, which fuels publicity for these big companies, but in the real world that media will turn on you in an instant when an incident occurs. There will be a large, active, hostile contingent of the public who depend on their jobs driving to feed their families and they wont just sit by and let their jobs become redundant. This isnt Uber, not by a long shot, this is massive global disruption. Like any tech venture, it needs to scale successfully to gain world wide dominance. Prove that it works in a particular environment and expand. Sure companies will love the cost savings that come from driveless tech, but the general public, wow that will be a fight.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  Society changes fast when a big shift like this comes along. People knew horses, they were used to them. Boom, gone, when the mass market motor car and motor tractor replaced them. Society adapted so hard that a horse went from a daily sight, to a symbol of the past. People will complain. Laws will be passed in backward places. Truckers will protest. Boom, gone.
Eric_WVGG 10y ago
I loved that this article focused on the peculiar de facto morality that has evolved around car culture. I quit driving about fifteen years ago, primarily get around on bicycle with the occasional train or Uber. You really need to get locked out of a car for a while to appreciate the weird sense of entitlement that drivers get. When the streets are full of cars and traffic is slow, well that’s just a fact of life, you mutter and deal with it. But if a bicycle is a driver’s commute by a few seconds, that’s license to go completely bananas. Somehow just the fact that someone owns a car makes them feel like their time is worth more than that of others, that society owes them a speedy drive, convenience, and free parking anywhere. When people are regularly encased in hermetically sealed wheeled bubbled, they turn into sociopaths.
- visarga 10y ago
  As a driver I often feel cyclists are reckless in how they ride in busy city streets. I have seen guys entering the path of a speeding car with no regard to his safety. Cyclists are not protected and I am acutely aware of the risks around them, and that makes me nervous. As a cyclist, I am afraid to take these risks, so I keep to sidewalks and parks. Unfortunately, when I walk on sidewalks I often feel threatened by the cyclists. They ride too fast, too close to people. They feel entitled and reckless because they have wheels and us only legs to walk. Cyclists sharing a sidewalk are just as bad, or worse compared to drivers sharing a road with cyclists. The solution would be dedicated cycling paths, but those are a rarity in my city and many of those that exist are just one meter width marked right on the sidewalk, reducing the space for walking. Sometimes the sidewalk is too narrow and people have to enter the cycling path in order to pass, and that's where a self entitled cyclist would run over you just to teach you not to step on his path. That's why I often walk with some anxiety, you never know who's on wheels and what they think they are entitled to do.
  - sonthonax 10y ago
    You should be nervous while driving a car, you should be hyper-vigilant, checking for those which your two tonne mass of iron could easily kill. Driving a car should be like flying a commercial plane, it's far to much responsibility for the average person to have. I'm nervous cycling my bicycle around London, surrounded by entitled drivers who complain about cyclists at every opportunity but who don't see the problem with texting while driving at speed? The solution would be to completely rid of cars in cities, and to only allow those who are physically disabled, or those who are highly trained to drive. How long is your commute? 10 miles? that's a 30 minute cycle journey each way (I did that before a hit and run road rage driver stopped me from cycling).
senthilnayagam 10y ago
Self driving cars are robots period When in doubt, follow the 3 laws for robots First generation of the self driving vehicle should focus on safe driving in comparison to typical human drivers. Like we have carpool/hov+ lanes we will start having autonomous lanes I expect cargo trucks would switch to autonomous due mundane nature of the work and long driving hours
- krapp 10y ago
  > When in doubt, follow the 3 laws for robots Asimov's 3 Laws were a plot device, not a serious attempt to codify ethics. They were designed to fail for dramatic effect, and his stories were about them failing constantly, because they presented the apparent paradox of a perfectly rational being appearing to behave irrationally. The only law Asimov's robots actually adhere to is the Law of Unintended Consequences - and I believe this is the actual lesson for autonomous car engineers. The more powerful an AI is, and the more complex it is, and the more likely it is to fail in ways that can't be predicted.

44 points by benbreen 10y ago

Self-driving cars that have even the slightest hope of considering such questions in split-second situations will, undoubtedly, already be better than any human driver. So when we get to the point where we have to actually ask questions like these, they'll still be an improvement over jerking the wheel in a random direction and praying. By then, perhaps, we will be able to investigate car crashes with the same rigor with which we investigate airplane crashes.

mc32 10y ago

However it works out, on the whole, there will be fewer deaths and injuries with autonomous cars. So, we can try to weight the different scenarios to give one a handicap over another --but this pales in comparison to all the lives saved by having autonomous cars.

jtlien1 10y ago
My take on driverless cars is that they should solve a few other problems first. Like our crazy insurance system. I should pay much less for driving on uncrowded rural highways than people who drive in congested cities. And pay by the number of miles driven. And fix the problem with drunken drivers and deer/car collisions. And taxes to pay for roads not on how many miles you drive on which roads using what kind of vehichle. Small cars are subsidizing semis and dump trucks.
- abrons 10y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, those urban drivers are subsidizing your uncrowded rural highways.
  - bpodgursky 10y ago
    The over-simplistic tax revenue argument that gets thrown around isn't useful. The urban drivers pay tax revenue, which then "subsidizes" rural highways, which then produce... incredibly cheap food. Which is then consumed in... cities. You could stop paying for highways, and then food gets more expensive, and it all evens out. And maybe that would make more sense. But don't trick yourself into thinking the relationship is parasitic.
Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
Yet even autonomous cars will kill more people than bicycles, trains, and walking infrastructure. Yes, I know, I know, suburban sprawl, rural communities, etc. But rather than perpetuating car-centric design and the inevitable, though fewer, deaths, maybe we should concentrate on designing walkable, bikeable, liveable cities instead.
- mc32 10y ago
  I love walking as much as anyone. And I love efficient and convenient mass transit, but I realize that there still is a place for cars. Tokyo, Paris, etc. Very good transit and very walkable, yet cars are still necessary. With autonomous vehicles we can utilize capacity better reducing the number of vehicles necessary to transport a given number of people.

CM30 10y ago

I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth. Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article itself points out that other, more normal safety features are being included that lower the risk from accidental collisions and the cars might not be going fast enough for this sort of issue to be a concern in most instances (read, those not involving a motorway or autobahn). And in those cases, well, anyone who might be in the path of such a car in such a situation might be best classed as 'too dumb to live', since high speed roads are not good places for pedestrian crossings or playing chicken. But in the 0.00001% of cases which this issue might be a thing, then they should honestly just value the driver and passengers. Like every other tool and item in human society,for good or bad alike.

ilostmykeys 10y ago
"Me first" is pretty dumb in the global sense. Cooperative (nit me first) games are the way to greater benefit for everyone.
- bsder 10y ago
  > "Me first" is pretty dumb in the global sense. Cooperative (nit me first) games are the way to greater benefit for everyone. Only for games with multiple iterations. In addition, "Me first" strategies often create something fairly close to optimal for a lot of cases--we call them "greedy" algorithms for a reason.
ikeboy 10y ago
I agree. If doing so makes people more willing to adopt driverless cars, it may save more lives. However, if the person would only be injured, it should prefer that to someone else's death (as the person himself would be legally obligated to do.)
- 10y ago

blazespin 10y ago

Talk about pointless edge case. It's so incredibly rare, you can just have the car protect the passenger and that's fine. My biggest concern about self driving cars is the ability to mess with the image recognition software. How hard would it be to flash a piece of material at a lidar/radar and confuse it that so much that it either crashes / goes into DOS / or thinks a minivan full of babies is cruising down the road towards it.

venomsnake 10y ago

double getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead){ return speedAtWhichStoppingDistanceIs (clear_road_ahead/3); } enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead)); Engineering solved morality once again.

mcbits 10y ago
try { enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead)); } catch (CatastrophicBrakeFailureException ex) { // ??? }
- hawkice 10y ago
  This is probably the perfect example of why I find these discussions massive wastes of time. If there is a catastrophic brake failure currently, with human drivers, it isn't seen as a deep philosophical issue. I have absolutely no clue why this changes because the car is operated differently.
- TillE 10y ago
  Sudden brake failure on a properly maintained car is vanishingly unlikely. Having it occur the instant you need to slam the brakes for a life-or-death intervention will basically never happen. For the vast, vast majority of catastrophic failures, the basic procedure of pulling over and stopping the car will be absolutely fine.
- venomsnake 10y ago
  turnOffEngine(); The engine turned off can be used very effectively as a brake.
  - sonthonax 10y ago
    Should an electric engine also literally be able to 'reverse the polarity' as well?
  - mcbits 10y ago
    Better catch EngineControlException. Oh, and TireShotBySniperException. Brake failure is just an example. There dozens of sensors and subsystems with innumerable combinations that can fail and put the vehicle in a state where some kind of collision is unavoidable. It will have to decide what to do. Humans end up calling randomPanic() at some point, so maybe that's what the vehicle should do to avoid accusations that it "intentionally" harmed one party or another.

CM30 10y ago

On another note, it could also be interesting to think about what the legal situation could be with a situation like this. If a driverless car prioritises the owner/passengers, then I can see a few court cases where the families of people killed by one would want to sue the manufacturer over it. And if it works the other way around, it could be the families of the passengers suing the company instead. At which point we then have to let the court system decide how a driverless car should act in the case of this problem. And then it gets even more complicated, since different countries and states (and even towns) might come to different conclusions here. Does your car now need to know how to act in every possible US state and country in the world in case it's taken there and gets into an accident?

csydas 10y ago
Legally, it will take awhile for most jurisdictions to catch up to the idea of driverless cars, though in the case of passenger death in the autonomous car, there will probably be some complicated legal waiver about what does and does not constitute fault in the software versus what is just an accident. More likely that naught, there will be federal regulations the US as to how the cars must behave, and states can elect whether or not to simply allow the cars, much like how there are national emissions standards.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

elcct 10y ago

The Amorality of typewriters. Oh wait...

mslot 10y ago

I don't believe that humans take split-second (binary?) decisions based on morality, only survival. Most of the time, people's instinct tells them to get off the road if there are no alternatives. This actually seems like a reasonable decision to increase the chance of survival. Self-driving cars should probably do the same.

PantaloonFlames 10y ago

All this hang-wringing about the decision a driverless car will make when faced with the trolley problem is pointless. Driverless cars will result in a MASSIVE reduction in deaths of drivers and passengers, a MASSIVE reduction in harm to human pedestrians and non-drivers and to the environment. Driverless cars do not look at their cell phones. Driverless cars do not drive drunk. Driverless cars are not in a hurry, not distracted, not upset by what their boss just said, or by the kids in the back seat. Driverless cars will not err as humans do. Driverless cars will reduce the incidence of "trolley problems" incurred in practice by 2 orders of magnitude or more. Driverless TRUCKS will allow cargo to travel at night, when humans are less likely to be on the road. Which will reduce congestion, which will allow people to get where they're going on time when they ARE on the road. Driverless trucks will KNOW when a car is behind them; there is no "blind spot", ever. And driverless trucks will signal to the car behind them, "you are too close, back off". And it will happen, and no one will get upset about it. Driverless cars will not accelerate pointlessly from a stoplight, only to slam on the brakes a second later, because they did not see the line of traffic ahead. Driverless cars will not engage in petty competition with other driverless cars. Driverless cars will be like Buddhist drivers - steady as she goes, no stress, no drama. That means less fuel consumption, less road wear, less environmental damage. Driverless cars will also give mobility to those who are unable to drive - people with eyesight challenges or physical coordination challenges. Anyone fretting about the ethics of driverless cars along the lines of this article is completely, utterly, radically missing the forest for the trees. Driverless cars will be a huge boon for modern society. (Don't get me started about the idiocy of the statement that "car sales are engineered to bring safety features to the expensive models". Has this author completely missed the lessons of capitalism? )

themartorana 10y ago
This. Every time I hear questioning of driverless cars, this. The moral win is at a macro level, and is so enormous as to render anyone's concerns about nearly-zero-percent-likely scenarios completely uninteresting at best, and actually harmful by slowing the adoption of driverless cars at worst. There is almost zero percent likelihood that the scenarios presented in this article would happen (as pointed out everywhere here). But just for shits and grins, it doesn't matter what decision is made at the macro level. Because while n people may die in a very unlikely scenario, where n is the maximum possible deaths in that scenario, the total number of lives saved in that same moment by driverless cars renders all moral questioning moot. Edit: to boot, driverless cars aren't amoral. The decision tree in these unlikely scenarios have already been programmed in by humans. It's their morality that you find yourself governed by.

lifeformed 10y ago

I don't get the controversy about this at all. Prioritize the passengers lives every time. If someone is walking around on the road, then they are putting themselves in an extremely dangerous position. Whether or not they deserve or intend it, they are the ones with the responsibility to not be there. It's unfortunate if they die, but it's their "fault", at least more than the passenger's fault. If a bunch of kid runs down a highway into incoming traffic, are all the cars supposed to kill themselves? Sure, people will accidentally be stuck in the middle of a road. If you're unlucky enough to be in that situation, that sucks, but you can't ask someone else to die for it. Accidents are a part of reality, we should minimize unfairness rather than minimize loss of utility. One person getting unlucky and dying is bad, but one person dying because someone else got unlucky is worse, in my opinion. That's twice the unfairness.

tim333 10y ago

>At some point, my car is going to have a choice between hitting a semi and hitting a minivan full of kids. No it's not. I doubt that has ever come up with a human driver and probably won't with autonomous drivers either. If it does both humans or robots will probably think oh shit, hit the brakes and hope for the best.

ommunist 10y ago

Technology is immoral. Business is immoral. These things cannot be put into the moral dimension. Only humans are moral beings (fortunately that can be fixed). Essentially, modern planes are 100% self-driving, and look, there are much less human lives spared in plane accidents than in car accidents every year.

calsy 10y ago

I always think of these things as tech dreams vs reality. No matter the publicity, no matter the hype, the reality is you will need to change the perception of a global public that have been driving cars for a century. You need to convince the world that it is safe to ride in a car not controlled by a person. I cant see this happening for sometime, decades even. Not only that but driverless cars will disrupt government revenue streams, the workforce, law enforcement etc. every industry will be affected and I don't think people are just going to welcome these changes with open arms. Sure the tech news is gushing with praise, which fuels publicity for these big companies, but in the real world that media will turn on you in an instant when an incident occurs. There will be a large, active, hostile contingent of the public who depend on their jobs driving to feed their families and they wont just sit by and let their jobs become redundant. This isnt Uber, not by a long shot, this is massive global disruption. Like any tech venture, it needs to scale successfully to gain world wide dominance. Prove that it works in a particular environment and expand. Sure companies will love the cost savings that come from driveless tech, but the general public, wow that will be a fight.

JulianMorrison 10y ago
Society changes fast when a big shift like this comes along. People knew horses, they were used to them. Boom, gone, when the mass market motor car and motor tractor replaced them. Society adapted so hard that a horse went from a daily sight, to a symbol of the past. People will complain. Laws will be passed in backward places. Truckers will protest. Boom, gone.

Eric_WVGG 10y ago

I loved that this article focused on the peculiar de facto morality that has evolved around car culture. I quit driving about fifteen years ago, primarily get around on bicycle with the occasional train or Uber. You really need to get locked out of a car for a while to appreciate the weird sense of entitlement that drivers get. When the streets are full of cars and traffic is slow, well that’s just a fact of life, you mutter and deal with it. But if a bicycle is a driver’s commute by a few seconds, that’s license to go completely bananas. Somehow just the fact that someone owns a car makes them feel like their time is worth more than that of others, that society owes them a speedy drive, convenience, and free parking anywhere. When people are regularly encased in hermetically sealed wheeled bubbled, they turn into sociopaths.

visarga 10y ago
As a driver I often feel cyclists are reckless in how they ride in busy city streets. I have seen guys entering the path of a speeding car with no regard to his safety. Cyclists are not protected and I am acutely aware of the risks around them, and that makes me nervous. As a cyclist, I am afraid to take these risks, so I keep to sidewalks and parks. Unfortunately, when I walk on sidewalks I often feel threatened by the cyclists. They ride too fast, too close to people. They feel entitled and reckless because they have wheels and us only legs to walk. Cyclists sharing a sidewalk are just as bad, or worse compared to drivers sharing a road with cyclists. The solution would be dedicated cycling paths, but those are a rarity in my city and many of those that exist are just one meter width marked right on the sidewalk, reducing the space for walking. Sometimes the sidewalk is too narrow and people have to enter the cycling path in order to pass, and that's where a self entitled cyclist would run over you just to teach you not to step on his path. That's why I often walk with some anxiety, you never know who's on wheels and what they think they are entitled to do.
- sonthonax 10y ago
  You should be nervous while driving a car, you should be hyper-vigilant, checking for those which your two tonne mass of iron could easily kill. Driving a car should be like flying a commercial plane, it's far to much responsibility for the average person to have. I'm nervous cycling my bicycle around London, surrounded by entitled drivers who complain about cyclists at every opportunity but who don't see the problem with texting while driving at speed? The solution would be to completely rid of cars in cities, and to only allow those who are physically disabled, or those who are highly trained to drive. How long is your commute? 10 miles? that's a 30 minute cycle journey each way (I did that before a hit and run road rage driver stopped me from cycling).

senthilnayagam 10y ago

Self driving cars are robots period When in doubt, follow the 3 laws for robots First generation of the self driving vehicle should focus on safe driving in comparison to typical human drivers. Like we have carpool/hov+ lanes we will start having autonomous lanes I expect cargo trucks would switch to autonomous due mundane nature of the work and long driving hours

krapp 10y ago
> When in doubt, follow the 3 laws for robots Asimov's 3 Laws were a plot device, not a serious attempt to codify ethics. They were designed to fail for dramatic effect, and his stories were about them failing constantly, because they presented the apparent paradox of a perfectly rational being appearing to behave irrationally. The only law Asimov's robots actually adhere to is the Law of Unintended Consequences - and I believe this is the actual lesson for autonomous car engineers. The more powerful an AI is, and the more complex it is, and the more likely it is to fail in ways that can't be predicted.