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what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage,

what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair

maxerickson 9y ago
Do you think we will tolerate autonomous cars operating at speeds that create those situations?
- damontal 9y ago
  if someone steps out in front your car going 30 MPH can you stop in time? i mean they walk right into your immediate path. do you think this kind of thing can't happen?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    That isn't the problem you posed. Now there is no maneuver that can save the pedestrian, for any driver. But for the most part, if there is low visibility and pedestrian proximity, 30 MPH is too fast. The streets here don't have much obstructing visibility other than parked cars, there are good sidewalks set well back from the streets and the speed limit is still 25 MPH.
throwawayjava 9y ago
The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything except instinctual choices. The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the insurance people do their thing. Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.
- ars 9y ago
  Millions??? You are off by two orders of magnitude. It was 35,000 two years ago. Still a lot of people, but not millions. Put in context, it's around one death per 100 million miles driven.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    Sorry, I mixed up the global and national numbers. Thanks.
cr0sh 9y ago
I will loosely paraphrase something I heard Sebastian Thrun remark on this situation (commonly known in philosophy as "the trolley problem"): 1) such a situation happening is extremely rare (more so in the classic example of the trolley problem) and 2) regardless of its possibility, if we are able to reduce the number of fatal and injurious accidents caused by automobiles by half, in the United States alone, such tragedies should not stop us from doing so For some reason, people always let the impossible attainment of perfection be the enemy of good enough (as the old saying goes). We will never get a perfect system. We don't have a perfect system right now. What we can get (indeed, I'd argue we're already there in the case of self-driving vehicles) is close enough that the difference is fairly negligible. That is, such systems can be made vastly better than the average human driver, and generally will come close or exceed that of professional drivers. We are arguing that we'd rather have a professional taxi driver at the wheel of a vehicle transporting us, who is 98% competent at his job (that's being generous, actually), rather than a machine which is 99.95% competent doing the same job (note that neither percentage is based in reality - I pulled both from my nether regions for this example - but they probably aren't too far off the mark, either - well, again, I'm being generous with the taxi driver). It's a purely irrational and emotional response not based on actual statistics and knowledge about accident rates. We'd rather continue letting drivers get in accidents, injuring or killing themselves and others, at a very high daily rate, than implement a technology which would rapidly make that number drop to very low levels over time. Part of it I think is that we want to be able to blame somebody. We can't blame a machine, for some reason, or its manufacturer - especially in the heat of the moment (provided we survive). We can instead blame ourselves, or more generally "the other guy" for being a bad driver. We have this innate problem with being able to say both "I don't know" and "bad things can happen for not any good reason", and instead must find something or someone to blame, and if it isn't ourselves, even better (hence a lot of religious expression not based on reality). There is so much benefit this technology can bring, even today. I don't personally think it is ready for consumer adoption quite yet, but I can see it being ready in less than 10 years, maybe less than 5. The problem for its adoption is that we'll likely never be ready, even if it attained a five 9's level of reliability, simply because if it failed, we'd have no one to blame but ourselves for trusting in it. For some reason, that simply will not do. We'd rather continue with the status-quo and continue to rack up the injuries and death, because at least then, we can blame the other guy instead of ourselves.
euyyn 9y ago
Depends: does the latter couple need relationship advice?

maxerickson 9y ago

Do you think we will tolerate autonomous cars operating at speeds that create those situations?

damontal 9y ago
if someone steps out in front your car going 30 MPH can you stop in time? i mean they walk right into your immediate path. do you think this kind of thing can't happen?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  That isn't the problem you posed. Now there is no maneuver that can save the pedestrian, for any driver. But for the most part, if there is low visibility and pedestrian proximity, 30 MPH is too fast. The streets here don't have much obstructing visibility other than parked cars, there are good sidewalks set well back from the streets and the speed limit is still 25 MPH.

throwawayjava 9y ago

The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything except instinctual choices. The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the insurance people do their thing. Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.

ars 9y ago
Millions??? You are off by two orders of magnitude. It was 35,000 two years ago. Still a lot of people, but not millions. Put in context, it's around one death per 100 million miles driven.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  Sorry, I mixed up the global and national numbers. Thanks.

cr0sh 9y ago

I will loosely paraphrase something I heard Sebastian Thrun remark on this situation (commonly known in philosophy as "the trolley problem"): 1) such a situation happening is extremely rare (more so in the classic example of the trolley problem) and 2) regardless of its possibility, if we are able to reduce the number of fatal and injurious accidents caused by automobiles by half, in the United States alone, such tragedies should not stop us from doing so For some reason, people always let the impossible attainment of perfection be the enemy of good enough (as the old saying goes). We will never get a perfect system. We don't have a perfect system right now. What we can get (indeed, I'd argue we're already there in the case of self-driving vehicles) is close enough that the difference is fairly negligible. That is, such systems can be made vastly better than the average human driver, and generally will come close or exceed that of professional drivers. We are arguing that we'd rather have a professional taxi driver at the wheel of a vehicle transporting us, who is 98% competent at his job (that's being generous, actually), rather than a machine which is 99.95% competent doing the same job (note that neither percentage is based in reality - I pulled both from my nether regions for this example - but they probably aren't too far off the mark, either - well, again, I'm being generous with the taxi driver). It's a purely irrational and emotional response not based on actual statistics and knowledge about accident rates. We'd rather continue letting drivers get in accidents, injuring or killing themselves and others, at a very high daily rate, than implement a technology which would rapidly make that number drop to very low levels over time. Part of it I think is that we want to be able to blame somebody. We can't blame a machine, for some reason, or its manufacturer - especially in the heat of the moment (provided we survive). We can instead blame ourselves, or more generally "the other guy" for being a bad driver. We have this innate problem with being able to say both "I don't know" and "bad things can happen for not any good reason", and instead must find something or someone to blame, and if it isn't ourselves, even better (hence a lot of religious expression not based on reality). There is so much benefit this technology can bring, even today. I don't personally think it is ready for consumer adoption quite yet, but I can see it being ready in less than 10 years, maybe less than 5. The problem for its adoption is that we'll likely never be ready, even if it attained a five 9's level of reliability, simply because if it failed, we'd have no one to blame but ourselves for trusting in it. For some reason, that simply will not do. We'd rather continue with the status-quo and continue to rack up the injuries and death, because at least then, we can blame the other guy instead of ourselves.

euyyn 9y ago

Depends: does the latter couple need relationship advice?