3 ms·
I think the real answer to this sort of question is: Who cares? There are tens of thousands of people dying every year in very real car crashes, plus probably
by ufmace 11y ago
I think the real answer to this sort of question is: Who cares?
There are tens of thousands of people dying every year in very real car crashes, plus probably an order of magnitude more suffering life-changing injuries, and self-driving cars have a huge potential to cut way down on that. Meanwhile, situations like that virtually never happen - maybe like once a year in the entire US. If they can eliminate even 10% of the actual accidents, then they could run down both pedestrians in that imaginary scenario, and still be way ahead.
It may be fun to think about ethical dilemmas like that, but they are fantastically rare compared to the huge numbers of perfectly ordinary crashes that happen every day. Let's fix those, and worry about the rare one-offs after we've reduced the accident rate by 95%.
- michaelmcmillan 11y agoYes, I agree with you. These edge cases will probably never actually happen. But again, this is only hypothetical. Are there lines of code that actually define the behaviour of the car in these cases? I think it's an interesting question (-: