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Stallman said it better: The Trolley Problem poses this question: if a trolley is about to run over and kill five people standing on the tracks, and you can sh

Stallman said it better: The Trolley Problem poses this question: if a trolley is about to run over and kill five people standing on the tracks, and you can shunt it to a different track where it would only kill one person, should you do it? Or what if you could save those five by throwing a person near you onto the tracks; should you do it? Many people feel intuitively that it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, and an argument attributes this to a supposed essential difference between killing someone and deciding to let that person die. I disagree. I too believe it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, in real life, but not in the hypothetical trolley problems. There is no ethically significant difference between killing a person and letting the person die, if (as supposed in the trolley problems) there is no doubt that the death will occur. The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. If you kill him, his death is pretty certain (though not totally; just recently a man was hanged in Iran and survived). If you merely don't take action to save him, he might survive anyway. He might jump off the track, for instance, or someone might pull him off. All sorts of things might happen. Likewise, throwing the one person onto the track might not succeed in saving the other five; how could you possibly be sure it would? You might find that you had done nothing but cause one additional death. Thus, in real life it is a good principle to avoid actively killing someone now, even if that might result in other deaths later. The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. Precisely for that reason, they are not a useful moral guide for most real situations. In general, difficult artificial moral conundrums are not very useful guides for real-life conduct. It's much more useful to think about real situations. In the free software movement I have often decided not to propose an answer to a general question until I had some real cases to think about. For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. More generally, the goal is to make sure to avoid any trolley problem. https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html

luckylion 6y ago
I did not expect Stallman to offer such lame thinking. > The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. Just like a cancer patient might always spontaneously get cured and you'd be an ass for cutting them open. Life is full of surprises, don't take action, ever! > For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. Wow, why didn't anybody ever think of making the car just stop? Like, have we tried talking to the car and asking it not to have malfunctioning brakes? What if we offer the car a nice oil change later in exchange for behaving and not running people over?
- ponker 6y ago
  Have you worked in AV? “Save Driver” vs “Save Pedestrian” isn’t actually a problem that comes up in the real world. There’s never a situation where you’d use a pedestrian as a meat bag to absorb a collision or fling a driver over a median to save a pedestrian. The dilemma is completely a philosophical construct, no self driving car will ever need to solve it. In reality, saving drivers and saving pedestrians are completely orthogonal problems.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    That's not the typical problem in AV's trolley problem, nobody argues (publicly) "the driver should always be first". You don't even need the driver to play a role, you can use an AV truck, train or drone. "Your brakes are gone, you cannot decrease speed. You are on a collision course with 10 people who are crossing the street. You can slightly alter your direction to run over one person instead." You can alter that as required, put a dog in the other lane. Or an old person. If you want to go deeper: put a light car in the other lane with the assumption that the driver of that car has a 10% chance to survive. Give http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ a try, they've set up a few different scenarios. "None of this will ever happen, the car will simply learn to fly and avoid the accident" is not an option unfortunately.
    - 6y ago
bigfoot675 6y ago
> the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. This actually isn't true in every scenario. What if there is a car following close behind? What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you? What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit? There are a lot of variables, and it's really not as straightforward as you make it sound
- function_seven 6y ago
  That's the entire point of Stallman's essay. Those what-ifs (EDIT: well, #2 and #3) aren't things the self-driving car (or a human driver, in most cases) will compute in the milliseconds it takes to make a decision. > What if there is a car following close behind? They may be able to stop fast enough. Whereas if you intentionally don't brake hard enough and strike the car in front of you, you (the computer) have traded a possibility for a certainty. You control your braking and following parameters, they control theirs. (EDIT: Yeah, if there's a lot of distance in front of you, then the car can make use of that. It doesn't need to screech to a halt in every case. But this isn't trolley-car territory, it's just the standard way adaptive cruise and emergency braking already works) > What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you? Irrelevant. It is not the car's job to be counting the number of occupants in every other car on the highway. > What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit? I want the self-driving car to not make that choice. The passengers in the car, however numerous, are much more likely to survive impact than unprotected pedestrians. It really is straightforward. Don't burden self-driving cars with silly edge-cases. Apply the most effective mitigation known in the general sense, and see that everyone is happy because they can anticipate the car's choices a bit better.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    > That's the entire point of Stallman's essay. Those what-ifs (EDIT: well, #2 and #3) aren't things the self-driving car (or a human driver, in most cases) will compute in the milliseconds it takes to make a decision. It could be computed in the seconds, or minutes which lead up to the incident. A smart driver, human or AI, has a ready, already computed backup plan.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
> The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. We're living the trolley problem problem in real life, right now, because human beings are bad at estimating risk. A lot of people are operating with a certainty that IF you are EXPOSED to the virus, you WILL contract it, and it WILL be terrible, and PROBABLY fatal. Therefore, no amount of safekeeping -- masks, distancing, wiping down delivered groceries, baking mail and newspapers -- can be too aggressive. For such people, diverting the "trolley" to make long-running, terrible financial hardships for a third of the population is an easy call, when they feel they are literally saving the life of everyone on forward track.
- yyyk 6y ago
  I don't see how this could be framed as a trolley problem. A trolley problem needs to compare two equivalent goods, where intentional 'action' is likely to cause less overall loss but at a direct cost to an 3rd party. Neither side regarding lockdown views this problem as such: People who support aggressive measures don't view their actions as killing the bystander. 'Financial hardship' is far from letting people die (i.e. no equivalent good from their PoV) and they almost always support measures to alleviate economic damage. People who oppose lockdown have differing arguments which don't map into a trolley either. An argument for lack of efficiency isn't relevant. Others' argument that governments' action is taking away liberty for security is closer, but no trolley either. For that, they'd have to weigh liberty of 'bystanders' again liberty of those that will get sick, and it's clear their concept of liberty does not accept the latter condition as a loss of liberty (no equivalent good either). You might wish to drop my suggested equivalent good criteria. I'm not so sure. If diverting the trolley merely slightly inconveniences the bystander, are we still talking about a trolley problem?
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    I wasn't arguing that the virus response was a trolley problem, but that it was a "trolley problem problem." Your response is almost too good to be true.
    - 6y ago

luckylion 6y ago

I did not expect Stallman to offer such lame thinking. > The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. Just like a cancer patient might always spontaneously get cured and you'd be an ass for cutting them open. Life is full of surprises, don't take action, ever! > For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. Wow, why didn't anybody ever think of making the car just stop? Like, have we tried talking to the car and asking it not to have malfunctioning brakes? What if we offer the car a nice oil change later in exchange for behaving and not running people over?

ponker 6y ago
Have you worked in AV? “Save Driver” vs “Save Pedestrian” isn’t actually a problem that comes up in the real world. There’s never a situation where you’d use a pedestrian as a meat bag to absorb a collision or fling a driver over a median to save a pedestrian. The dilemma is completely a philosophical construct, no self driving car will ever need to solve it. In reality, saving drivers and saving pedestrians are completely orthogonal problems.
- luckylion 6y ago
  That's not the typical problem in AV's trolley problem, nobody argues (publicly) "the driver should always be first". You don't even need the driver to play a role, you can use an AV truck, train or drone. "Your brakes are gone, you cannot decrease speed. You are on a collision course with 10 people who are crossing the street. You can slightly alter your direction to run over one person instead." You can alter that as required, put a dog in the other lane. Or an old person. If you want to go deeper: put a light car in the other lane with the assumption that the driver of that car has a 10% chance to survive. Give http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ a try, they've set up a few different scenarios. "None of this will ever happen, the car will simply learn to fly and avoid the accident" is not an option unfortunately.
  - 6y ago

bigfoot675 6y ago

> the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. This actually isn't true in every scenario. What if there is a car following close behind? What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you? What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit? There are a lot of variables, and it's really not as straightforward as you make it sound

function_seven 6y ago
That's the entire point of Stallman's essay. Those what-ifs (EDIT: well, #2 and #3) aren't things the self-driving car (or a human driver, in most cases) will compute in the milliseconds it takes to make a decision. > What if there is a car following close behind? They may be able to stop fast enough. Whereas if you intentionally don't brake hard enough and strike the car in front of you, you (the computer) have traded a possibility for a certainty. You control your braking and following parameters, they control theirs. (EDIT: Yeah, if there's a lot of distance in front of you, then the car can make use of that. It doesn't need to screech to a halt in every case. But this isn't trolley-car territory, it's just the standard way adaptive cruise and emergency braking already works) > What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you? Irrelevant. It is not the car's job to be counting the number of occupants in every other car on the highway. > What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit? I want the self-driving car to not make that choice. The passengers in the car, however numerous, are much more likely to survive impact than unprotected pedestrians. It really is straightforward. Don't burden self-driving cars with silly edge-cases. Apply the most effective mitigation known in the general sense, and see that everyone is happy because they can anticipate the car's choices a bit better.
- garmaine 6y ago
  > That's the entire point of Stallman's essay. Those what-ifs (EDIT: well, #2 and #3) aren't things the self-driving car (or a human driver, in most cases) will compute in the milliseconds it takes to make a decision. It could be computed in the seconds, or minutes which lead up to the incident. A smart driver, human or AI, has a ready, already computed backup plan.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

> The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. We're living the trolley problem problem in real life, right now, because human beings are bad at estimating risk. A lot of people are operating with a certainty that IF you are EXPOSED to the virus, you WILL contract it, and it WILL be terrible, and PROBABLY fatal. Therefore, no amount of safekeeping -- masks, distancing, wiping down delivered groceries, baking mail and newspapers -- can be too aggressive. For such people, diverting the "trolley" to make long-running, terrible financial hardships for a third of the population is an easy call, when they feel they are literally saving the life of everyone on forward track.

yyyk 6y ago
I don't see how this could be framed as a trolley problem. A trolley problem needs to compare two equivalent goods, where intentional 'action' is likely to cause less overall loss but at a direct cost to an 3rd party. Neither side regarding lockdown views this problem as such: People who support aggressive measures don't view their actions as killing the bystander. 'Financial hardship' is far from letting people die (i.e. no equivalent good from their PoV) and they almost always support measures to alleviate economic damage. People who oppose lockdown have differing arguments which don't map into a trolley either. An argument for lack of efficiency isn't relevant. Others' argument that governments' action is taking away liberty for security is closer, but no trolley either. For that, they'd have to weigh liberty of 'bystanders' again liberty of those that will get sick, and it's clear their concept of liberty does not accept the latter condition as a loss of liberty (no equivalent good either). You might wish to drop my suggested equivalent good criteria. I'm not so sure. If diverting the trolley merely slightly inconveniences the bystander, are we still talking about a trolley problem?
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  I wasn't arguing that the virus response was a trolley problem, but that it was a "trolley problem problem." Your response is almost too good to be true.
  - 6y ago