5 ms·

Yep tons of focus on philosophical sideshows like the trolley problem in these discussions, when autonomous cars just plain _do not work_ in the general case.

• dogma1138 8y ago
  People can’t solve a trolley problem either while driving (or at all). If you have enough time to stop if say a kid just jumped in front of you you will stop, if you don’t you don’t have enough time to process all the information around you and gauge the most optimal outcome if you swerve you swerve but that is likely going to happen regardless of what jumps out in front of you simply because that what your instincts are telling you to do. The best thing an autonomous vehicle can offer is a better response time so you’ll be more likely to stop or to slow down to non/less than fatal velocity.
  • throwaway2048 8y ago
    Nobody is saying people have solved it either, I am saying that the question is at best a distraction.
    • dogma1138 8y ago
      Yeah it’s a complete distraction, even if you were living in some dystopian world where each car could ping everyone around it to gauge their citizen score and select the lowest score citizen to run over in this Kobayashi Maru scenario your cars would be much safer if they didn’t waste CPU cycles on this nonsense but rather just focus on the road. Drivers are drivers doesn’t matter if it’s humans or robots distracting them with nonsense wouldn’t make them better or safer but rather quite the opposite.
      • Chris_Chambers 8y ago
        You should be banned from continuing to participate in this thread. Half of the comments are from you and we already understand what your position is.
• hellllllllooo 8y ago
  Right. The trolley problem assumes vehicles can make optimal split second decisions while right now Tesla can't even tell the difference between the road and a lane divider reliably. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tesla-steering-toward-lane-divider-again https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tes...
  • dogma1138 8y ago
    The trolley problem is not relevant to driving autonomous or not.
    • darkpuma 8y ago
      Human drivers do have to make split second ethical decisions though: You're driving down a country road and a small animal jumps out in front of you. Do you hit the animal, or do you swerve into the ditch? Hitting the animal would kill it, but not harm you. Swerving into the ditch might harm you. There is no right answer to that question, because I didn't specify what the animal is. Whether the animal is a baby deer or a human child will influence your choice. This isn't contrived. When I hit a deer, I made a choice to stay on the road. Had it been a child, I would have swerved, endangering myself in the process.