7 ms·

Barak Obama wants to solve robocar "Trolley Problems"

49 points by Symmetry 10y ago

neom 10y ago
I'm curious what we do when we "solve" (hmmm...) the trolley problem and continue to build autonomous machines that take this "problem" into account, however, a machine malfunctions, or is placed in a situation that it could not execute the prescribed outcome for the problem (if that makes sense). Where then do we place the blame?
belzebub 10y ago
The answer is simple, find a way to do a quick credit check on the possible targets, which ever one has less ability to sue, run them over!
- sosuke 10y ago
  Reminds me of some article I read where drivers in China would go for a "kill" hit. "Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit." http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2... Ugh, I started skimming the article again and I can't read it. Just gruesome.
  - mc32 10y ago
    The perverse incentive was, if I recall correctly, if you maim someone you're responsible for their wellbeing for life. If they are killed, it's a manageable lump sum.
  - foolinaround 10y ago
    Oh wow... In India, if one has hit a pedestrian, the advice has been to never stop -- you will get beaten up just as worse... just get away from the scene if you can.
  - Raphmedia 10y ago
    "Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects."
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    When this article came up before I ended up being persuaded that it was probably mostly bullshit.
  - joesmo 10y ago
    In light of this, I think the whole point of the article is maximized. A couple of extremely rare fatalities every few years (hell, even every MONTH) are nothing compared to the carnage and hell we would be avoiding by removing humans as drivers. Until you can make a case that those two types of carnage are even comparable in numbers (which is unlikely), talking about trolleys and who to hit in case of an accident should indeed be reserved for freshman year ethics classes. Note, it's not even an interesting enough ethical problem to make it past Ethics 101 (sort of like, "Will you steal medicine to cure your dying family member?").
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  What if the car would pick the outcome that would cost the least based on predicted insurance claims?
  - qbrass 10y ago
    It would pick the outcome that would cost the least based on the lawsuit the car company would get.
klodolph 10y ago
I feel like there's a [sic] missing from the title there.
- bradtemp 10y ago
  Typo fixed, sorry
shpx 10y ago
I'll say it again, this "discussion" is just bike shedding. [0] As an example, not everyone can have an opinion on how much of a role deep learning should/will play in a self driving car, of what types of deep learning models we should try, or how we should interface between neral nets and regular code. But everyone and their mother can talk about trolley problems, it's a mind virus that's existed for 50 years. You tell me more about yourself than about self driving cars. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- bradtemp 10y ago
  Yes, this is the point of the article
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- EdHominem 10y ago
  It's not only philosophical wankery, it's also technological nonsense. It's ridiculous to imagine a self-driving car that can determine that hitting a fat man on the sidewalk would slow the car just enough to avoid killing the girl scouts. If you acknowledge the impossibility of the exact knowledge these problems are framed with they become a lot less "interesting". Also, sorry for the spoilers, but there's only one correct answer - the car cares about the occupants first in a life and death situation. The car can be pretty sure that it contains humans, but it can't really tell if the suddenly appearing object in the road is a toddler (who the designers might want to prioritize) or a seagull. It's not like we all have IFF transmitters. Given that, unless you want me to be able to kill you by throwing a seagull onto the road in front of your car, it must prioritize the occupants.
duaneb 10y ago
> You might get criticized for running over jaywalkers when you could have veered onto the sidewalk, but the former won’t be punished by the law and the latter can be. If people don’t like the law, they should change the law. Yeesh, the author is asking for a bloodbath. Have you ever been to a city? Jaywalking is just how the world works, and they have de facto ROW. The law is almost entirely irrelevant and is exclusively used to profile minorities. If we start with the law we start with a broken system. It might allow you to pass the blame in court, but it's not going to save your ass when your shiny car logo has pedestrian blood on it from sprinting through times square. While this gets way too much attention, there is still some difference between the opportunities, and the law is the last place to look for sanity or rationality.
- munificent 10y ago
  Did you read the entire sentence? The author is saying robocars should not veer onto the sidewalk to avoid jaywalkers, not that they should indiscriminately hit them for funsies. If the car can stop for them, it of course would, which is the reality >99% of the time, just like it is for human drivers.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I'm actually kind of looking forward to there being a new selection pressure on a broad population. Especially as this would not be an unfair or targeted out, just... a universal case of, "If you can't handle crosswalks, life is too much for you in general."
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    Its going to vastly decrease the existing selection pressure of traffic. Robot cars are going to be designed vastly safer then human drivers, because they irrationally scare us more.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      It's going to reward people who might otherwise have a very human loss of concentration, and everyone around them. That it might also put pressure on careless pedestrians doesn't bother me too much, in the grand scheme of things.
ams6110 10y ago
The author is likely right. Self-driving cars will stay in their right of way at all times, and do their best to avoid collisions within that constraint. Departing from the legal right of way to "avoid" a collision will likely be a no-win for liability reasons.
coderzach 10y ago
> By and large the law already has an answer Not really, morality =/= legality. I don't want legal self driving cars, I want moral ones. Laws will always be an imperfect implementation of morality. Do self driving cars have to respect the laws of countries that don't respect the rights of minority groups? Should self driving cars in Saudi Arabia prefer to hit women? Legality isn't an escape hatch that absolves you of the moral implications of your actions.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  It isn't, but we're talking about people who are thoughtless and casual in the defense of their own life and health, and choose to jaywalk, not women, or minority groups of some kind. Morally speaking, I find it difficult to fall on the side of people who place the burden of keeping them alive on society at large, out of sheer carelessness. “Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” -Heinlein
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mindslight 10y ago
    You're actually talking about people who do casually defend their own life and health, by choosing to walk. In actual urban cities (eg NYC, Chicago, Boston), pedestrians are quite capable of informally navigating with cars, crossing at any point of a street rather than waiting for some preposterous "walk light" (and possibly even being expected to push a filthy button to activate it!?). Streets are a shared resource for many types of users, so it is certainly not a given that a single type of traffic should be given utmost blind priority. That kind of thing is an explicit policy decision, and is currently reserved for the few "controlled access" highways. I think it will be quite unfortunate if the west coast style of "oblivious" driving becomes calcified as code and exported to the rest of the world. Self-driving cars actually represent an opportunity to roll back this fallacious attitude that "streets are for cars", as a self-driving car is much more attentive and will not tire of being vigilant. For example, if your automatic car cannot gauge whether a crossing pedestrian intents to cross in front of or behind it and make a slight speed adjustment (as said pedestrian has already done, and as current human drivers are expected to do), then it deserves to come to a quick stop and wait there like an idiot until you upgrade it to competency. In line with the original article, I think this whole subject is an utter red herring and an amazing illustration of how the media can manufacture its own concern over a topic just to fill pages. The thought experiment is specifically called the "trolley problem" because trolleys run on discrete tracks and stop slowly. In the real world braking and turning have basically the same avoidance distance, accelerating does not save you from accidents, and people are never expected to drive off cliffs to avoid pedestrians.
Cenk 10y ago
Barak?
yk 10y ago
I think this is one of the situations were the intuition of non-engineers should simply be ignored. If we go with the numbers from the article, one fatal accident per 2 million hours driven, and if we assume that this is in the ballpark of trolley problem situation, then we need for the trolley problem detector something like six-nines reliability so that the false positives are just in the same ball park as the true positives. And make no mistake, false positives means that the automatic car decides to kill the group of children even though it could just drive safely. So the best code is the empty line, it executes reliable and predictable, does not introduce bugs and is really fast.
darkerside 10y ago
The "right" answer to the question as posed does seem to be for the car not to deviate from its intended lane and right of way. However, the likely conclusion of this technology is streets that are totally unsafe for any kind of illegal crossing. As acceptable mortality thresholds are established, speed limits on automated cars are certain to increase, considering the unchecked thirst for convenience by owners of any technology. Once we have cars whizzing down the road at high speed, with an established social understanding that cars do not cede right of way, streets will essentially become off limits. Compare this to 100 years ago when playing outside and in the street was commonplace and relatively risk free. I'm not a Luddite, but is the freedom we're giving up over our world worth the convenience of automated driving?
- Swizec 10y ago
  Reminds me of Fahrenheit. Bradbury envisioned roads where cars go really really fast, can barely see where they're going since all is a blur. Social norm is that stepping on the road means you die and that you were an idiot for having done it. Cars don't break or swerve for people or animals on road. They might feel inconvenienced by the splash of blood on their car.
  - darkerside 10y ago
    Bradbury certainly had a strong sense for how society/technology evolve. Are such accidents worth the cost of essentially creating additional free time for the majority of car-operating humanity? Sorry for the leading question.
    - Swizec 10y ago
      Are school shootings worth the cost of guns you can buy easily? US sure thinks so. Sorry for the loaded answer.
      - darkerside 10y ago
        A sincere apology if you took my previous post as flippant. If it wasn't clear, I believe we need to think twice any time we value convenience over safety.
bambax 10y ago
First and foremost, robocars need to protect their occupants, because if they don't and can decide to self destruct in order to "save" some stranger whose life is "more valuable" according to some algorithm, nobody will ever ride in one, and society will be worse off as a result.
- bambax 10y ago
  While reading the Obama interview in Wired I come across this: > ITO: When we did the car trolley problem, we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people. They also said they would never buy a self-driving car. [Laughs.] They shouldn't laugh, because that's the problem right there. If you think your car can decide to "sacrifice" you under some circumstances, then you will not get into it, and the whole self-driving system doesn't even start.
myf01d 10y ago
The boss wants, the slaves do, the boss takes the credit & profit. A forever loop that may end only if you become the boss.
joeblau 10y ago
This two year old solved it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4
johngalt 10y ago
Exactly, this is the most navel gazing fake moral dilemma. We already know that we could reduce fatalities on the road by reducing speeds and using different types of intersections. We choose to do neither with regularity. Because they would cost time and/or money. Objectively autonomous vehicles are such a massively huge improvement in our capabilities that we should be taking larger risks than we are currently. We shouldn't be hand wringing about these constructed 'what ifs'. The entirety of our efforts should be focused on pushing the envelope on implementation/execution.
karmicthreat 10y ago
The case for this is actually similar to how damage from vaccines are litigated. Vaccines are objectively a good thing for society. Yet, they do cause harm to a small number of people. So we have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle these claims. These laws also shield the manufacturers from most liability. Now gross negligence isn't going to be covered by this and I'm sure lawyers can find other instances. This seems like a good concept for self driving vehicles if removing humans makes injuries orders of magnitude less. It won't be perfect, so in those cases a national program for compensation and liability shielding makes sense. Then the technology and be quickly deployed and improved.
- stale2002 10y ago
  That's overcomplicating things. Accidents and lawsuits will be handled and paid for by the same people that handle them right now. They will be handled by the insurance companies. Except now, the insurance companies will be paying an order of magnitude less money due to the safety increase.
- gnopgnip 10y ago
  A better comparison is the MCCA (Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association) All current auto insurance cases with settlements are reimbursed by the fund for amounts over $545k. If this was expanded to cover self driving cars it would still hold the companies financially responsible for the damage they cause while allowing them to take risks without going out of business.
rabboRubble 10y ago
I participated in a trolley problem test (probably found a link to the test here) a few months back. The point of the test was to determine my ethical biases about how many and which people to kill based on age, sex, fitness, etc. I found the results meaningless because I don't gauge which action to take based on classifications like age, sex, or societal function. I gauge my actions on total number of lives taken, and which move was the least asshole move to take. If I'm in a certain lane, and I'm guaranteed to kill 3 people in either lane, I stay in my assigned lane because it's an asshole move to switch lanes just because I think [blank] about the people in front of my car. I stay in my lane, kill the same number of people, and deal with the consequences. Plus driving at any speed, I don't think I can see category well enough to make decisions, except perhaps for babies in buggies that are so visually different. Even then the buggy cart could be filled with junk. So the least asshole move is to stay in my assigned lane and kill the people in front of me. Although I might try to avoid a baby in a buggy / obvious small child because that is one distinction I'd be guaranteed to see at most speeds.

49 points by Symmetry 10y ago

neom 10y ago

I'm curious what we do when we "solve" (hmmm...) the trolley problem and continue to build autonomous machines that take this "problem" into account, however, a machine malfunctions, or is placed in a situation that it could not execute the prescribed outcome for the problem (if that makes sense). Where then do we place the blame?

belzebub 10y ago

The answer is simple, find a way to do a quick credit check on the possible targets, which ever one has less ability to sue, run them over!

sosuke 10y ago
Reminds me of some article I read where drivers in China would go for a "kill" hit. "Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit." http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2... Ugh, I started skimming the article again and I can't read it. Just gruesome.
- mc32 10y ago
  The perverse incentive was, if I recall correctly, if you maim someone you're responsible for their wellbeing for life. If they are killed, it's a manageable lump sum.
- foolinaround 10y ago
  Oh wow... In India, if one has hit a pedestrian, the advice has been to never stop -- you will get beaten up just as worse... just get away from the scene if you can.
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  "Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects."
- Joeboy 10y ago
  When this article came up before I ended up being persuaded that it was probably mostly bullshit.
- joesmo 10y ago
  In light of this, I think the whole point of the article is maximized. A couple of extremely rare fatalities every few years (hell, even every MONTH) are nothing compared to the carnage and hell we would be avoiding by removing humans as drivers. Until you can make a case that those two types of carnage are even comparable in numbers (which is unlikely), talking about trolleys and who to hit in case of an accident should indeed be reserved for freshman year ethics classes. Note, it's not even an interesting enough ethical problem to make it past Ethics 101 (sort of like, "Will you steal medicine to cure your dying family member?").
zitterbewegung 10y ago
What if the car would pick the outcome that would cost the least based on predicted insurance claims?
- qbrass 10y ago
  It would pick the outcome that would cost the least based on the lawsuit the car company would get.

klodolph 10y ago

I feel like there's a [sic] missing from the title there.

bradtemp 10y ago
Typo fixed, sorry

shpx 10y ago

I'll say it again, this "discussion" is just bike shedding. [0] As an example, not everyone can have an opinion on how much of a role deep learning should/will play in a self driving car, of what types of deep learning models we should try, or how we should interface between neral nets and regular code. But everyone and their mother can talk about trolley problems, it's a mind virus that's existed for 50 years. You tell me more about yourself than about self driving cars. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

bradtemp 10y ago
Yes, this is the point of the article
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
EdHominem 10y ago
It's not only philosophical wankery, it's also technological nonsense. It's ridiculous to imagine a self-driving car that can determine that hitting a fat man on the sidewalk would slow the car just enough to avoid killing the girl scouts. If you acknowledge the impossibility of the exact knowledge these problems are framed with they become a lot less "interesting". Also, sorry for the spoilers, but there's only one correct answer - the car cares about the occupants first in a life and death situation. The car can be pretty sure that it contains humans, but it can't really tell if the suddenly appearing object in the road is a toddler (who the designers might want to prioritize) or a seagull. It's not like we all have IFF transmitters. Given that, unless you want me to be able to kill you by throwing a seagull onto the road in front of your car, it must prioritize the occupants.

duaneb 10y ago

> You might get criticized for running over jaywalkers when you could have veered onto the sidewalk, but the former won’t be punished by the law and the latter can be. If people don’t like the law, they should change the law. Yeesh, the author is asking for a bloodbath. Have you ever been to a city? Jaywalking is just how the world works, and they have de facto ROW. The law is almost entirely irrelevant and is exclusively used to profile minorities. If we start with the law we start with a broken system. It might allow you to pass the blame in court, but it's not going to save your ass when your shiny car logo has pedestrian blood on it from sprinting through times square. While this gets way too much attention, there is still some difference between the opportunities, and the law is the last place to look for sanity or rationality.

munificent 10y ago
Did you read the entire sentence? The author is saying robocars should not veer onto the sidewalk to avoid jaywalkers, not that they should indiscriminately hit them for funsies. If the car can stop for them, it of course would, which is the reality >99% of the time, just like it is for human drivers.
M_Grey 10y ago
I'm actually kind of looking forward to there being a new selection pressure on a broad population. Especially as this would not be an unfair or targeted out, just... a universal case of, "If you can't handle crosswalks, life is too much for you in general."
- kazagistar 10y ago
  Its going to vastly decrease the existing selection pressure of traffic. Robot cars are going to be designed vastly safer then human drivers, because they irrationally scare us more.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    It's going to reward people who might otherwise have a very human loss of concentration, and everyone around them. That it might also put pressure on careless pedestrians doesn't bother me too much, in the grand scheme of things.

ams6110 10y ago

The author is likely right. Self-driving cars will stay in their right of way at all times, and do their best to avoid collisions within that constraint. Departing from the legal right of way to "avoid" a collision will likely be a no-win for liability reasons.

coderzach 10y ago

> By and large the law already has an answer Not really, morality =/= legality. I don't want legal self driving cars, I want moral ones. Laws will always be an imperfect implementation of morality. Do self driving cars have to respect the laws of countries that don't respect the rights of minority groups? Should self driving cars in Saudi Arabia prefer to hit women? Legality isn't an escape hatch that absolves you of the moral implications of your actions.

M_Grey 10y ago
It isn't, but we're talking about people who are thoughtless and casual in the defense of their own life and health, and choose to jaywalk, not women, or minority groups of some kind. Morally speaking, I find it difficult to fall on the side of people who place the burden of keeping them alive on society at large, out of sheer carelessness. “Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” -Heinlein
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mindslight 10y ago
  You're actually talking about people who do casually defend their own life and health, by choosing to walk. In actual urban cities (eg NYC, Chicago, Boston), pedestrians are quite capable of informally navigating with cars, crossing at any point of a street rather than waiting for some preposterous "walk light" (and possibly even being expected to push a filthy button to activate it!?). Streets are a shared resource for many types of users, so it is certainly not a given that a single type of traffic should be given utmost blind priority. That kind of thing is an explicit policy decision, and is currently reserved for the few "controlled access" highways. I think it will be quite unfortunate if the west coast style of "oblivious" driving becomes calcified as code and exported to the rest of the world. Self-driving cars actually represent an opportunity to roll back this fallacious attitude that "streets are for cars", as a self-driving car is much more attentive and will not tire of being vigilant. For example, if your automatic car cannot gauge whether a crossing pedestrian intents to cross in front of or behind it and make a slight speed adjustment (as said pedestrian has already done, and as current human drivers are expected to do), then it deserves to come to a quick stop and wait there like an idiot until you upgrade it to competency. In line with the original article, I think this whole subject is an utter red herring and an amazing illustration of how the media can manufacture its own concern over a topic just to fill pages. The thought experiment is specifically called the "trolley problem" because trolleys run on discrete tracks and stop slowly. In the real world braking and turning have basically the same avoidance distance, accelerating does not save you from accidents, and people are never expected to drive off cliffs to avoid pedestrians.

Cenk 10y ago

Barak?

yk 10y ago

I think this is one of the situations were the intuition of non-engineers should simply be ignored. If we go with the numbers from the article, one fatal accident per 2 million hours driven, and if we assume that this is in the ballpark of trolley problem situation, then we need for the trolley problem detector something like six-nines reliability so that the false positives are just in the same ball park as the true positives. And make no mistake, false positives means that the automatic car decides to kill the group of children even though it could just drive safely. So the best code is the empty line, it executes reliable and predictable, does not introduce bugs and is really fast.

darkerside 10y ago

The "right" answer to the question as posed does seem to be for the car not to deviate from its intended lane and right of way. However, the likely conclusion of this technology is streets that are totally unsafe for any kind of illegal crossing. As acceptable mortality thresholds are established, speed limits on automated cars are certain to increase, considering the unchecked thirst for convenience by owners of any technology. Once we have cars whizzing down the road at high speed, with an established social understanding that cars do not cede right of way, streets will essentially become off limits. Compare this to 100 years ago when playing outside and in the street was commonplace and relatively risk free. I'm not a Luddite, but is the freedom we're giving up over our world worth the convenience of automated driving?

Swizec 10y ago
Reminds me of Fahrenheit. Bradbury envisioned roads where cars go really really fast, can barely see where they're going since all is a blur. Social norm is that stepping on the road means you die and that you were an idiot for having done it. Cars don't break or swerve for people or animals on road. They might feel inconvenienced by the splash of blood on their car.
- darkerside 10y ago
  Bradbury certainly had a strong sense for how society/technology evolve. Are such accidents worth the cost of essentially creating additional free time for the majority of car-operating humanity? Sorry for the leading question.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    Are school shootings worth the cost of guns you can buy easily? US sure thinks so. Sorry for the loaded answer.
    - darkerside 10y ago
      A sincere apology if you took my previous post as flippant. If it wasn't clear, I believe we need to think twice any time we value convenience over safety.

bambax 10y ago

First and foremost, robocars need to protect their occupants, because if they don't and can decide to self destruct in order to "save" some stranger whose life is "more valuable" according to some algorithm, nobody will ever ride in one, and society will be worse off as a result.

bambax 10y ago
While reading the Obama interview in Wired I come across this: > ITO: When we did the car trolley problem, we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people. They also said they would never buy a self-driving car. [Laughs.] They shouldn't laugh, because that's the problem right there. If you think your car can decide to "sacrifice" you under some circumstances, then you will not get into it, and the whole self-driving system doesn't even start.

myf01d 10y ago

The boss wants, the slaves do, the boss takes the credit & profit. A forever loop that may end only if you become the boss.

joeblau 10y ago

This two year old solved it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4

johngalt 10y ago

Exactly, this is the most navel gazing fake moral dilemma. We already know that we could reduce fatalities on the road by reducing speeds and using different types of intersections. We choose to do neither with regularity. Because they would cost time and/or money. Objectively autonomous vehicles are such a massively huge improvement in our capabilities that we should be taking larger risks than we are currently. We shouldn't be hand wringing about these constructed 'what ifs'. The entirety of our efforts should be focused on pushing the envelope on implementation/execution.

karmicthreat 10y ago

The case for this is actually similar to how damage from vaccines are litigated. Vaccines are objectively a good thing for society. Yet, they do cause harm to a small number of people. So we have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle these claims. These laws also shield the manufacturers from most liability. Now gross negligence isn't going to be covered by this and I'm sure lawyers can find other instances. This seems like a good concept for self driving vehicles if removing humans makes injuries orders of magnitude less. It won't be perfect, so in those cases a national program for compensation and liability shielding makes sense. Then the technology and be quickly deployed and improved.

stale2002 10y ago
That's overcomplicating things. Accidents and lawsuits will be handled and paid for by the same people that handle them right now. They will be handled by the insurance companies. Except now, the insurance companies will be paying an order of magnitude less money due to the safety increase.
gnopgnip 10y ago
A better comparison is the MCCA (Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association) All current auto insurance cases with settlements are reimbursed by the fund for amounts over $545k. If this was expanded to cover self driving cars it would still hold the companies financially responsible for the damage they cause while allowing them to take risks without going out of business.

rabboRubble 10y ago

I participated in a trolley problem test (probably found a link to the test here) a few months back. The point of the test was to determine my ethical biases about how many and which people to kill based on age, sex, fitness, etc. I found the results meaningless because I don't gauge which action to take based on classifications like age, sex, or societal function. I gauge my actions on total number of lives taken, and which move was the least asshole move to take. If I'm in a certain lane, and I'm guaranteed to kill 3 people in either lane, I stay in my assigned lane because it's an asshole move to switch lanes just because I think [blank] about the people in front of my car. I stay in my lane, kill the same number of people, and deal with the consequences. Plus driving at any speed, I don't think I can see category well enough to make decisions, except perhaps for babies in buggies that are so visually different. Even then the buggy cart could be filled with junk. So the least asshole move is to stay in my assigned lane and kill the people in front of me. Although I might try to avoid a baby in a buggy / obvious small child because that is one distinction I'd be guaranteed to see at most speeds.