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How Would a Self-Driving Car Handle the Trolley Problem?

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nullish_signal 4y ago
  As Davex points out there: "The article never gets around to actually answering the question. In reality they don’t participate in the trolly problem..." Their Handing of it would also involve Shutting Down 1 second before impact, apparently. This seems to mimic the Animal Instinct of freezing during Intense Stress, so that at the very least, one does nothing to make the situation even worse (in Tesla's case, perhaps avoiding Battery Power through a wire that is Cut by the other Car? I have no clue...)
• nness 4y ago
  Whatever course of action reduces/transfers the manufactures' liability, would be my guess.
• bell-cot 4y ago
  As a kid in an intro philosophy class, the Trolley Problem sounded really cool and interesting and was great to talk about. After [cough] decades as a grown-up, I've noticed that real-world Trolley Problems pretty much don't exist. Maybe if I was a medic on a battlefield in Ukraine, making "keep trying to save this guy, vs. rush over there to where several other wounded soldiers need help..." decision? So - I generally figure that Self-Driving Cars (or fork lifts, etc.) should have some simple "kinda try to minimize impact energies and bias toward quickly coming to a stop out of the way" algorithm for ~all situations where hitting things seems unavoidable. Don't waste too many LoC's on it. I've never heard that any government required humans to study Trolley Problems before they got a driver's license.