You or Them

Are the pedestrians making my car payments?
Being a driverless car it's not likely you own the car. It's more likely you pay a monthly fee for use driverless cars.

The driverless car cannot stop in time by applying the brakes.
The only options are to swerve and hit the wall, or hit one or more pedestrians.

The point is there are moral considerations that have not before needed to be considered.
 
Are the pedestrians making my car payments?
Being a driverless car it's not likely you own the car. It's more likely you pay some company a monthly fee to use their driverless cars.

So the car should send the company an email asking them what it should do, and mow down the pedestrians while waiting for a response. I'm ok with that.
 
Are the pedestrians making my car payments?
Being a driverless car it's not likely you own the car. It's more likely you pay a monthly fee for use driverless cars.

The driverless car cannot stop in time by applying the brakes.
The only options are to swerve and hit the wall, or hit one or more pedestrians.

The point is there are moral considerations that have not before needed to be considered.

The optimal course of action would be for the vehicle calculate the to risk to human life with all available options and choose the option that will result in the lowest probability of loss of human life or injury. There are three problems with this:
1. You have to design a car "smart" enough to make such a decision reliably and accurately.
2. By having the car make this decision you open the company and the programmers up to liability should the car make the "wrong" choice.
3. People aren't going to be comfortable getting into one of these cars knowing it may decide that their injury or death may be the lesser of two evils and allow them to be killed or injured, even if the car's decision was correct.

In reality, they would probably just program the car to strictly obey all traffic laws and drive as defensibly as possible. That way, if it does get into an accident, it will be unlikely to be the cars fault. So they will be covered both legally and morally.
 
I would want the car to find that correctly positioned vegetable cart in front of the people, turn on the jets and do it's best Dukes of Hazard impression flying over the people and land perfectly on the other side.
 
People forcing my car into a brick wall is why I will never have or ride in a driverless car.
 
People are expecting more of Tesla's Auto-Pilot than it is designed to do - RTFM.

In other words there is no cure for stupid people.
 
People are expecting more of Tesla's Auto-Pilot than it is designed to do - RTFM.

In other words there is no cure for stupid people.
0004460002509_A
 

Most reactions

Back
Top