However it works out, on the whole, there will be fewer deaths and injuries with autonomous cars.
So, we can try to weight the different scenarios to give one a handicap over another --but this pales in comparison to all the lives saved by having autonomous cars.
My take on driverless cars is that they should solve a few other problems first. Like our crazy insurance system. I should pay much less for driving on uncrowded rural highways than people who drive in congested cities. And pay by the number of miles driven. And fix the problem with drunken drivers and deer/car collisions. And taxes to pay for roads
not on how many miles you drive on which roads using what kind of vehichle. Small cars are subsidizing semis and dump trucks.
The over-simplistic tax revenue argument that gets thrown around isn't useful.
The urban drivers pay tax revenue, which then "subsidizes" rural highways, which then produce... incredibly cheap food. Which is then consumed in... cities.
You could stop paying for highways, and then food gets more expensive, and it all evens out. And maybe that would make more sense. But don't trick yourself into thinking the relationship is parasitic.
Yet even autonomous cars will kill more people than bicycles, trains, and walking infrastructure.
Yes, I know, I know, suburban sprawl, rural communities, etc. But rather than perpetuating car-centric design and the inevitable, though fewer, deaths, maybe we should concentrate on designing walkable, bikeable, liveable cities instead.
I love walking as much as anyone. And I love efficient and convenient mass transit, but I realize that there still is a place for cars. Tokyo, Paris, etc. Very good transit and very walkable, yet cars are still necessary. With autonomous vehicles we can utilize capacity better reducing the number of vehicles necessary to transport a given number of people.
I'm going to be extremely unpopular for saying this, but I still think the self driving car problem should be solved by having them value the people in the car more than those on the road around them. Is that immoral? Maybe, but if I'm buying a car, I like to think it's looking out for me first and someone else seven hundred and fifty sixth.
Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article itself points out that other, more normal safety features are being included that lower the risk from accidental collisions and the cars might not be going fast enough for this sort of issue to be a concern in most instances (read, those not involving a motorway or autobahn). And in those cases, well, anyone who might be in the path of such a car in such a situation might be best classed as 'too dumb to live', since high speed roads are not good places for pedestrian crossings or playing chicken.
But in the 0.00001% of cases which this issue might be a thing, then they should honestly just value the driver and passengers. Like every other tool and item in human society,for good or bad alike.
I actually got a rather deep insight from the article, which was "How would an autonomous car get itself into such a situation?"
Such a car would not drive so close to a truck that it could not simply stop should the truck lose its cargo. It would not approach a tunnel at a rate of speed where it could not brake to avoid an obstruction. People do that because they ignore risk in favor of some perceived time advantage, but robots don't.
If we imagine the sets of circumstances that require a life and death decision to occur while driving safely, suddenly the number becomes vanishingly small. Things like "an earthquake occurs and the bridge you are on loses a section." or "a power transformer explodes and drops a power line across the road", or "a plane crashes into the ground in front of you." Under these extreme situations how the human in control would perform is practically a random number function. That a robot would minimize the loss of life, seems like the "correct" choice regardless.
Yeah, the chance of such a situation occurring is pretty much slim to none. A driverless car isn't going to be driving like a maniac at many times the speed limit and putting itself into dangerous situations at every opportunity.
Then again, given some of the stuff there's a market for, I guess there is the worry that 'driverless car aimed at person who wants to be in James Bond/Bullitt/whatever' might turn out to be a selling point for some manufacturers with questionable ethics.
I think there's a positive feedback loop in there too...
As cars go autonomous, they'll communicate faster, drive more predictably, and generally be safer. At some point - 1%, 5%, 20%? - the network as a whole will benefit with less accidents and less of the resulting delays which means human drivers will be less likely to be late which takes away anxiety and potential distractions, making it even safer.
Therefore, I think these "Do I kill A or B?" scenarios become less frequent over time.
I just hope that "over time" part happens quickly... or the first "bad" choice by an autonomous car will delay the industry by years.
It's all about perspective. If 1M people a year die in auto accidents and you improve that by dropping it to 100K a year, you've done something worthwhile with technology. But, once it's 100K, taking it to 10K deaths a year is 10X as hard of a problem. Etc.
What I'm saying is that there are diminishing returns on eliminating all accidents, unless you are continuously elevating someone's life to an infinite value (your own, for example).
Is our expectation at some point that ZERO people of INFINITE value die shuttling themselves physically around this planet every a year? I'd be willing to accept a small chance of death (by contract even) if I always got to my appointments on time. Think of it as a fancy donor card.
Is the second 90% reduction really 10X as hard as the first 90% reduction? That doesn't seem at all obvious to me. Sure, each 100 death reduction is harder, but the pace of progress seems it should be about a straight line when graphed semi-log.
People sometimes need the back sides of lane markers to be red to show there driving in the wrong direction at highway speeds. That's the kind of safety issues self driving cars need to address. Highly convoluted but what if a clown and a child jump off an overpass style crap completely misses the point. Self driving cars could chose to randomly kill someone randomly once per 1,000 years on the road and still end up safer than people.
Safer than what's already there is a valid point, but it's also (somewhat unfortunately) not one a lot of legal systems tend to go by. For example, it's likely that if alcohol or tobacco was invented in this decade, it would have been banned as a 'dangerous' drug. But safer alternatives aren't exactly legalised because they're safer than what's already out there.
Depends on how similar something is. There are a lot of drugs that are basically morphine with basically all it's downsides, that have been approved. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydromorphone Trying to get a drug like that approved on it's own would have been vastly harder.
As to cars the major upside is they are all one on one collisions. And insurance companies are really good at handling that already. There are even laws limiting how much pedestrians for example can sue for if they are struck in some areas.
Supposing autonomous cars actually drive extremely safely and this results in them going 20 km/h under the speed limit. Are drivers going to be happy about the length of their commute increasing while regular car drivers (due to human recklessness) wiz by in the left lane at 130 km/h? I think you'd see a lot of human drivers get frustrated and turn off the AI.
Laminar flow might actually be faster than turbulent flow where everyone perceives they are "getting ahead".
Particularly when this "getting ahead" behavior results in accidents that require road closures that back up highways for hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
i think it's a little early in the self driving cycle to be upset at their speed. There's no limitation keeping them going slow. In fact they could easily and safety drive much faster.
Yes, once they get past the initial adjustment, assuming we have actual autonomous cars, and not 95% autonomous that require a completely alert individual driving them, then the commute is not lost time, it can be time spent working, relaxing, or doing something besides simply staring at the bumper of the person ahead of them.
We are already have fully automatic transportation machines: lifts. Are you happy with them? Do you want to use faster lifts at exchange of higher risk of injure or death? Do you want such faster lifts for others or for your family?
IMHO, safety will win. Human life is much more valuable than wasted time. 50km/h is consider as safe speed for human driver in city. Computers are faster, so 60-70km/h will be safe for them.
If our society was actually that concerned with safety we would have backtracked from automobile infrastructure a long time ago, but we've allowed them to dominate our public space despite the dangers they pose.
The maximum safe speed on any street where there is the possibility of a kid hidden behind a parked car is 30 km/h, no matter human or robot driver.
A 30 kph collision with a pedestrian is almost always survivable. Anything faster isn't.
Robots can react faster, but cars still take time to stop. Most streets don't have more than a couple of feet of distance between moving traffic and parked cars. Reaction time is meaningless there.
Robots can adjust speed of the car according to situation, especially on electric cars with recuperation of energy in brakes. Robots can use statistics or history of incidents to improve safety.
Robots can use also other things to improve safety, which cannot be used by human driver because (s)he is busy with driving, e.g. "laser" pointers of car direction of drive at road, like "mark my lane" light used by bicyclist; or directed audio/video/vibration alarms to warn of potential crash; or safety hands at front of car (like human hands), which will be released by computer to pickup child right before hit, or to to take hit from larger distance, slowly, or to change direction of car, or remove something from the road.
Actually, I'd predict the opposite -- that people will purposefully start to increase their commute times and tell the car to "take the scenic route." People are frustrated with commuting because they have to be mentally engaged doing it. When that's no longer a requirement, people will watch movies/tv, read books / news articles, do their makeup/prep their hair, give each other massages/have sex, play video games, etc. etc. instead of driving their cars. I wouldn't put it entirely out of the question (except for the issue of fuel costs) that people will start buying bigger cars (akin to RVs or campers) so that they can take all their crap with them. I can almost guarantee you that people will basically want to roll out of bed into their offices / place of work, assuming the driving can be done all automatically.
Depends what they're commuting for. A lot of businesses want you to be there even day at 9pm on the dot, no exceptions. For people working at companies like this, minimising their daily commute is basically essential, since their bosses will not negotiate on things like start times, end times and the amount of work done in the day.
Do people really want to lose their remaining time with their family just to spend it commuting and doing the same stuff they could be at doing at home in the car? How about losing their sleep in the morning because their car takes longer to get them to work than it used to?
Some people might want to roll straight out of bed and into their offices/workplace. A lot of others would rather minimise the time spent going to/leaving work and spend it in their own home doing stuff they want to be doing.
I think the issue is slightly misguided as well, but not quite in that way. I think it's sort of natural that the idea of a merged driver and driverless vehicle lanes will eventually vanish, and sections of highway and city roads will eventually give way to entirely autonomous solutions. Segregating the driving population in this way removes a lot of the concerns, since now when faced with the issue of "wayward child in road", a single car doesn't have to make a decision, but instead, collectively cars decide how to mitigate the situation.
This does come with quite a few caveats in regards to road surveillance and infrastructure and legal turnabout, but it makes a lot more sense than trying to merge the two completely different styles of driving. Essentially that is the problem that will cause accidents; pretty much everyone who drive should know that traffic patterns that deviate from what is expected and currently existing on the road are common causes for accidents. Trying to merge two completely separate types of driving just seems like a fools errand, though I do understand that the alternative would probably be a bit too much for the current public and governments.
Ultimately though, I think that while the ethical concerns are real, they become greatly diminished along with the natural evolution of where autonomous cars take city infrastructure.
People who worry about the moral decision-making of a car are pointing out that there's a sort of ethics reduction (in the math sense of the word) here: deciding on the ideal driverless car is about as hard as deciding on what the ideal moral framework is. The car must have some routine to deal with trolley problems somewhere.
If we follow Asimov, your car will take the hit and likely that is how it should be. The car's only judgment call should be, can I avoid this threat without threatening another?
You run into a cascade problem if your car decides to weigh the fates of other cars by trying to run some value comparison. Who sets the values? Can they be spoofed, and so on.
So first rule is that it cannot harm another vehicle to save itself. You aren't really part of the equation here, you cannot be. By the act of using the autonomous automobile you and it become one for sake of the how the rules play out.
Putting the occupants' safety first is probably the best default to start with, as it's pretty close to what we have already, although given enough time, there will surely be cases where the car chooses to save the driver when the driver would have sacrificed themselves willingly or by some miscalculation.
But I think the ethical dilemma will end up solving itself over time, as well. When a car has to make an emergency decision, it will make a 5-10 millisecond call to its attorney, Dr. Watson, Esq., who will review all case history and settlements, run background checks on the potential victims, weigh all the factors against the current political climate, and direct the car to choose the accident with the lowest expected liability.
Talk about pointless edge case. It's so incredibly rare, you can just have the car protect the passenger and that's fine. My biggest concern about self driving cars is the ability to mess with the image recognition software. How hard would it be to flash a piece of material at a lidar/radar and confuse it that so much that it either crashes / goes into DOS / or thinks a minivan full of babies is cruising down the road towards it.
This is probably the perfect example of why I find these discussions massive wastes of time.
If there is a catastrophic brake failure currently, with human drivers, it isn't seen as a deep philosophical issue. I have absolutely no clue why this changes because the car is operated differently.
Sudden brake failure on a properly maintained car is vanishingly unlikely. Having it occur the instant you need to slam the brakes for a life-or-death intervention will basically never happen.
For the vast, vast majority of catastrophic failures, the basic procedure of pulling over and stopping the car will be absolutely fine.
Better catch EngineControlException. Oh, and TireShotBySniperException. Brake failure is just an example. There dozens of sensors and subsystems with innumerable combinations that can fail and put the vehicle in a state where some kind of collision is unavoidable. It will have to decide what to do.
Humans end up calling randomPanic() at some point, so maybe that's what the vehicle should do to avoid accusations that it "intentionally" harmed one party or another.
On another note, it could also be interesting to think about what the legal situation could be with a situation like this. If a driverless car prioritises the owner/passengers, then I can see a few court cases where the families of people killed by one would want to sue the manufacturer over it. And if it works the other way around, it could be the families of the passengers suing the company instead.
At which point we then have to let the court system decide how a driverless car should act in the case of this problem. And then it gets even more complicated, since different countries and states (and even towns) might come to different conclusions here. Does your car now need to know how to act in every possible US state and country in the world in case it's taken there and gets into an accident?
Legally, it will take awhile for most jurisdictions to catch up to the idea of driverless cars, though in the case of passenger death in the autonomous car, there will probably be some complicated legal waiver about what does and does not constitute fault in the software versus what is just an accident.
More likely that naught, there will be federal regulations the US as to how the cars must behave, and states can elect whether or not to simply allow the cars, much like how there are national emissions standards.
I don't believe that humans take split-second (binary?) decisions based on morality, only survival. Most of the time, people's instinct tells them to get off the road if there are no alternatives. This actually seems like a reasonable decision to increase the chance of survival. Self-driving cars should probably do the same.
All this hang-wringing about the decision a driverless car will make when faced with the trolley problem is pointless.
Driverless cars will result in a MASSIVE reduction in deaths of drivers and passengers, a MASSIVE reduction in harm to human pedestrians and non-drivers and to the environment.
Driverless cars do not look at their cell phones. Driverless cars do not drive drunk. Driverless cars are not in a hurry, not distracted, not upset by what their boss just said, or by the kids in the back seat. Driverless cars will not err as humans do. Driverless cars will reduce the incidence of "trolley problems" incurred in practice by 2 orders of magnitude or more.
Driverless TRUCKS will allow cargo to travel at night, when humans are less likely to be on the road. Which will reduce congestion, which will allow people to get where they're going on time when they ARE on the road. Driverless trucks will KNOW when a car is behind them; there is no "blind spot", ever. And driverless trucks will signal to the car behind them, "you are too close, back off". And it will happen, and no one will get upset about it.
Driverless cars will not accelerate pointlessly from a stoplight, only to slam on the brakes a second later, because they did not see the line of traffic ahead. Driverless cars will not engage in petty competition with other driverless cars. Driverless cars will be like Buddhist drivers - steady as she goes, no stress, no drama. That means less fuel consumption, less road wear, less environmental damage.
Driverless cars will also give mobility to those who are unable to drive - people with eyesight challenges or physical coordination challenges.
Anyone fretting about the ethics of driverless cars along the lines of this article is completely, utterly, radically missing the forest for the trees.
Driverless cars will be a huge boon for modern society.
(Don't get me started about the idiocy of the statement that "car sales are engineered to bring safety features to the expensive models". Has this author completely missed the lessons of capitalism? )
This. Every time I hear questioning of driverless cars, this. The moral win is at a macro level, and is so enormous as to render anyone's concerns about nearly-zero-percent-likely scenarios completely uninteresting at best, and actually harmful by slowing the adoption of driverless cars at worst.
There is almost zero percent likelihood that the scenarios presented in this article would happen (as pointed out everywhere here). But just for shits and grins, it doesn't matter what decision is made at the macro level. Because while n people may die in a very unlikely scenario, where n is the maximum possible deaths in that scenario, the total number of lives saved in that same moment by driverless cars renders all moral questioning moot.
Edit: to boot, driverless cars aren't amoral. The decision tree in these unlikely scenarios have already been programmed in by humans. It's their morality that you find yourself governed by.
Driverless cars will still err, though. They will err like software. The car won't be distracted, but if a software fault causes a google car to classify a certain make of car as invisible due to its lidar signature, or the glitch it causes in the algorithim, it will be far worse. Human error is significant, but software error probably can be more catastrophic because it can affect a huge subset of cars, much more than human error can.
I don't get the controversy about this at all. Prioritize the passengers lives every time.
If someone is walking around on the road, then they are putting themselves in an extremely dangerous position. Whether or not they deserve or intend it, they are the ones with the responsibility to not be there. It's unfortunate if they die, but it's their "fault", at least more than the passenger's fault. If a bunch of kid runs down a highway into incoming traffic, are all the cars supposed to kill themselves?
Sure, people will accidentally be stuck in the middle of a road. If you're unlucky enough to be in that situation, that sucks, but you can't ask someone else to die for it. Accidents are a part of reality, we should minimize unfairness rather than minimize loss of utility.
One person getting unlucky and dying is bad, but one person dying because someone else got unlucky is worse, in my opinion. That's twice the unfairness.
>At some point, my car is going to have a choice between hitting a semi and hitting a minivan full of kids.
No it's not. I doubt that has ever come up with a human driver and probably won't with autonomous drivers either. If it does both humans or robots will probably think oh shit, hit the brakes and hope for the best.
Self-driving cars that have even the slightest hope of considering such questions in split-second situations will, undoubtedly, already be better than any human driver. So when we get to the point where we have to actually ask questions like these, they'll still be an improvement over jerking the wheel in a random direction and praying. By then, perhaps, we will be able to investigate car crashes with the same rigor with which we investigate airplane crashes.
Technology is immoral. Business is immoral. These things cannot be put into the moral dimension. Only humans are moral beings (fortunately that can be fixed). Essentially, modern planes are 100% self-driving, and look, there are much less human lives spared in plane accidents than in car accidents every year.
I always think of these things as tech dreams vs reality. No matter the publicity, no matter the hype, the reality is you will need to change the perception of a global public that have been driving cars for a century. You need to convince the world that it is safe to ride in a car not controlled by a person. I cant see this happening for sometime, decades even.
Not only that but driverless cars will disrupt government revenue streams, the workforce, law enforcement etc. every industry will be affected and I don't think people are just going to welcome these changes with open arms.
Sure the tech news is gushing with praise, which fuels publicity for these big companies, but in the real world that media will turn on you in an instant when an incident occurs. There will be a large, active, hostile contingent of the public who depend on their jobs driving to feed their families and they wont just sit by and let their jobs become redundant. This isnt Uber, not by a long shot, this is massive global disruption.
Like any tech venture, it needs to scale successfully to gain world wide dominance. Prove that it works in a particular environment and expand. Sure companies will love the cost savings that come from driveless tech, but the general public, wow that will be a fight.
Society changes fast when a big shift like this comes along. People knew horses, they were used to them. Boom, gone, when the mass market motor car and motor tractor replaced them. Society adapted so hard that a horse went from a daily sight, to a symbol of the past.
People will complain. Laws will be passed in backward places. Truckers will protest. Boom, gone.
I loved that this article focused on the peculiar de facto morality that has evolved around car culture.
I quit driving about fifteen years ago, primarily get around on bicycle with the occasional train or Uber. You really need to get locked out of a car for a while to appreciate the weird sense of entitlement that drivers get.
When the streets are full of cars and traffic is slow, well that’s just a fact of life, you mutter and deal with it. But if a bicycle is a driver’s commute by a few seconds, that’s license to go completely bananas. Somehow just the fact that someone owns a car makes them feel like their time is worth more than that of others, that society owes them a speedy drive, convenience, and free parking anywhere.
When people are regularly encased in hermetically sealed wheeled bubbled, they turn into sociopaths.
As a driver I often feel cyclists are reckless in how they ride in busy city streets. I have seen guys entering the path of a speeding car with no regard to his safety. Cyclists are not protected and I am acutely aware of the risks around them, and that makes me nervous. As a cyclist, I am afraid to take these risks, so I keep to sidewalks and parks.
Unfortunately, when I walk on sidewalks I often feel threatened by the cyclists. They ride too fast, too close to people. They feel entitled and reckless because they have wheels and us only legs to walk. Cyclists sharing a sidewalk are just as bad, or worse compared to drivers sharing a road with cyclists.
The solution would be dedicated cycling paths, but those are a rarity in my city and many of those that exist are just one meter width marked right on the sidewalk, reducing the space for walking. Sometimes the sidewalk is too narrow and people have to enter the cycling path in order to pass, and that's where a self entitled cyclist would run over you just to teach you not to step on his path. That's why I often walk with some anxiety, you never know who's on wheels and what they think they are entitled to do.
You should be nervous while driving a car, you should be hyper-vigilant, checking for those which your two tonne mass of iron could easily kill. Driving a car should be like flying a commercial plane, it's far to much responsibility for the average person to have.
I'm nervous cycling my bicycle around London, surrounded by entitled drivers who complain about cyclists at every opportunity but who don't see the problem with texting while driving at speed?
The solution would be to completely rid of cars in cities, and to only allow those who are physically disabled, or those who are highly trained to drive. How long is your commute? 10 miles? that's a 30 minute cycle journey each way (I did that before a hit and run road rage driver stopped me from cycling).
I get that there are lousy cyclists, and I am truly embarrassed by them. But that is no excuse for drivers to behave recklessly around them.
w/r/t the notion that cyclists sharing a sidewalk with pedestrians (a practice I would never condone) is "just as bad" as drivers sharing the road with cyclists, that's just stupid. A two ton machine can kill people. Pedestrians being killed by cyclists is nearly unheard of. It happened once in Central Park last year and the event was so extraordinary that bicycle blogs were talking about it for weeks.
Asimov's 3 Laws were a plot device, not a serious attempt to codify ethics. They were designed to fail for dramatic effect, and his stories were about them failing constantly, because they presented the apparent paradox of a perfectly rational being appearing to behave irrationally.
The only law Asimov's robots actually adhere to is the Law of Unintended Consequences - and I believe this is the actual lesson for autonomous car engineers. The more powerful an AI is, and the more complex it is, and the more likely it is to fail in ways that can't be predicted.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadThe urban drivers pay tax revenue, which then "subsidizes" rural highways, which then produce... incredibly cheap food. Which is then consumed in... cities.
You could stop paying for highways, and then food gets more expensive, and it all evens out. And maybe that would make more sense. But don't trick yourself into thinking the relationship is parasitic.
Yes, I know, I know, suburban sprawl, rural communities, etc. But rather than perpetuating car-centric design and the inevitable, though fewer, deaths, maybe we should concentrate on designing walkable, bikeable, liveable cities instead.
Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article itself points out that other, more normal safety features are being included that lower the risk from accidental collisions and the cars might not be going fast enough for this sort of issue to be a concern in most instances (read, those not involving a motorway or autobahn). And in those cases, well, anyone who might be in the path of such a car in such a situation might be best classed as 'too dumb to live', since high speed roads are not good places for pedestrian crossings or playing chicken.
But in the 0.00001% of cases which this issue might be a thing, then they should honestly just value the driver and passengers. Like every other tool and item in human society,for good or bad alike.
Only for games with multiple iterations.
In addition, "Me first" strategies often create something fairly close to optimal for a lot of cases--we call them "greedy" algorithms for a reason.
However, if the person would only be injured, it should prefer that to someone else's death (as the person himself would be legally obligated to do.)
Such a car would not drive so close to a truck that it could not simply stop should the truck lose its cargo. It would not approach a tunnel at a rate of speed where it could not brake to avoid an obstruction. People do that because they ignore risk in favor of some perceived time advantage, but robots don't.
If we imagine the sets of circumstances that require a life and death decision to occur while driving safely, suddenly the number becomes vanishingly small. Things like "an earthquake occurs and the bridge you are on loses a section." or "a power transformer explodes and drops a power line across the road", or "a plane crashes into the ground in front of you." Under these extreme situations how the human in control would perform is practically a random number function. That a robot would minimize the loss of life, seems like the "correct" choice regardless.
Then again, given some of the stuff there's a market for, I guess there is the worry that 'driverless car aimed at person who wants to be in James Bond/Bullitt/whatever' might turn out to be a selling point for some manufacturers with questionable ethics.
As cars go autonomous, they'll communicate faster, drive more predictably, and generally be safer. At some point - 1%, 5%, 20%? - the network as a whole will benefit with less accidents and less of the resulting delays which means human drivers will be less likely to be late which takes away anxiety and potential distractions, making it even safer.
Therefore, I think these "Do I kill A or B?" scenarios become less frequent over time.
I just hope that "over time" part happens quickly... or the first "bad" choice by an autonomous car will delay the industry by years.
What I'm saying is that there are diminishing returns on eliminating all accidents, unless you are continuously elevating someone's life to an infinite value (your own, for example).
Is our expectation at some point that ZERO people of INFINITE value die shuttling themselves physically around this planet every a year? I'd be willing to accept a small chance of death (by contract even) if I always got to my appointments on time. Think of it as a fancy donor card.
People sometimes need the back sides of lane markers to be red to show there driving in the wrong direction at highway speeds. That's the kind of safety issues self driving cars need to address. Highly convoluted but what if a clown and a child jump off an overpass style crap completely misses the point. Self driving cars could chose to randomly kill someone randomly once per 1,000 years on the road and still end up safer than people.
As to cars the major upside is they are all one on one collisions. And insurance companies are really good at handling that already. There are even laws limiting how much pedestrians for example can sue for if they are struck in some areas.
Particularly when this "getting ahead" behavior results in accidents that require road closures that back up highways for hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
IMHO, safety will win. Human life is much more valuable than wasted time. 50km/h is consider as safe speed for human driver in city. Computers are faster, so 60-70km/h will be safe for them.
A 30 kph collision with a pedestrian is almost always survivable. Anything faster isn't.
Robots can react faster, but cars still take time to stop. Most streets don't have more than a couple of feet of distance between moving traffic and parked cars. Reaction time is meaningless there.
Robots can use also other things to improve safety, which cannot be used by human driver because (s)he is busy with driving, e.g. "laser" pointers of car direction of drive at road, like "mark my lane" light used by bicyclist; or directed audio/video/vibration alarms to warn of potential crash; or safety hands at front of car (like human hands), which will be released by computer to pickup child right before hit, or to to take hit from larger distance, slowly, or to change direction of car, or remove something from the road.
Humans cannot do that but robots can.
Do people really want to lose their remaining time with their family just to spend it commuting and doing the same stuff they could be at doing at home in the car? How about losing their sleep in the morning because their car takes longer to get them to work than it used to?
Some people might want to roll straight out of bed and into their offices/workplace. A lot of others would rather minimise the time spent going to/leaving work and spend it in their own home doing stuff they want to be doing.
This does come with quite a few caveats in regards to road surveillance and infrastructure and legal turnabout, but it makes a lot more sense than trying to merge the two completely different styles of driving. Essentially that is the problem that will cause accidents; pretty much everyone who drive should know that traffic patterns that deviate from what is expected and currently existing on the road are common causes for accidents. Trying to merge two completely separate types of driving just seems like a fools errand, though I do understand that the alternative would probably be a bit too much for the current public and governments.
Ultimately though, I think that while the ethical concerns are real, they become greatly diminished along with the natural evolution of where autonomous cars take city infrastructure.
You run into a cascade problem if your car decides to weigh the fates of other cars by trying to run some value comparison. Who sets the values? Can they be spoofed, and so on.
So first rule is that it cannot harm another vehicle to save itself. You aren't really part of the equation here, you cannot be. By the act of using the autonomous automobile you and it become one for sake of the how the rules play out.
It seems that, as driverless cars become more common, you are more frequently on the other side of the equation.
But I think the ethical dilemma will end up solving itself over time, as well. When a car has to make an emergency decision, it will make a 5-10 millisecond call to its attorney, Dr. Watson, Esq., who will review all case history and settlements, run background checks on the potential victims, weigh all the factors against the current political climate, and direct the car to choose the accident with the lowest expected liability.
If there is a catastrophic brake failure currently, with human drivers, it isn't seen as a deep philosophical issue. I have absolutely no clue why this changes because the car is operated differently.
For the vast, vast majority of catastrophic failures, the basic procedure of pulling over and stopping the car will be absolutely fine.
The engine turned off can be used very effectively as a brake.
Humans end up calling randomPanic() at some point, so maybe that's what the vehicle should do to avoid accusations that it "intentionally" harmed one party or another.
At which point we then have to let the court system decide how a driverless car should act in the case of this problem. And then it gets even more complicated, since different countries and states (and even towns) might come to different conclusions here. Does your car now need to know how to act in every possible US state and country in the world in case it's taken there and gets into an accident?
More likely that naught, there will be federal regulations the US as to how the cars must behave, and states can elect whether or not to simply allow the cars, much like how there are national emissions standards.
Driverless cars will result in a MASSIVE reduction in deaths of drivers and passengers, a MASSIVE reduction in harm to human pedestrians and non-drivers and to the environment.
Driverless cars do not look at their cell phones. Driverless cars do not drive drunk. Driverless cars are not in a hurry, not distracted, not upset by what their boss just said, or by the kids in the back seat. Driverless cars will not err as humans do. Driverless cars will reduce the incidence of "trolley problems" incurred in practice by 2 orders of magnitude or more.
Driverless TRUCKS will allow cargo to travel at night, when humans are less likely to be on the road. Which will reduce congestion, which will allow people to get where they're going on time when they ARE on the road. Driverless trucks will KNOW when a car is behind them; there is no "blind spot", ever. And driverless trucks will signal to the car behind them, "you are too close, back off". And it will happen, and no one will get upset about it.
Driverless cars will not accelerate pointlessly from a stoplight, only to slam on the brakes a second later, because they did not see the line of traffic ahead. Driverless cars will not engage in petty competition with other driverless cars. Driverless cars will be like Buddhist drivers - steady as she goes, no stress, no drama. That means less fuel consumption, less road wear, less environmental damage.
Driverless cars will also give mobility to those who are unable to drive - people with eyesight challenges or physical coordination challenges.
Anyone fretting about the ethics of driverless cars along the lines of this article is completely, utterly, radically missing the forest for the trees.
Driverless cars will be a huge boon for modern society.
(Don't get me started about the idiocy of the statement that "car sales are engineered to bring safety features to the expensive models". Has this author completely missed the lessons of capitalism? )
There is almost zero percent likelihood that the scenarios presented in this article would happen (as pointed out everywhere here). But just for shits and grins, it doesn't matter what decision is made at the macro level. Because while n people may die in a very unlikely scenario, where n is the maximum possible deaths in that scenario, the total number of lives saved in that same moment by driverless cars renders all moral questioning moot.
Edit: to boot, driverless cars aren't amoral. The decision tree in these unlikely scenarios have already been programmed in by humans. It's their morality that you find yourself governed by.
If someone is walking around on the road, then they are putting themselves in an extremely dangerous position. Whether or not they deserve or intend it, they are the ones with the responsibility to not be there. It's unfortunate if they die, but it's their "fault", at least more than the passenger's fault. If a bunch of kid runs down a highway into incoming traffic, are all the cars supposed to kill themselves?
Sure, people will accidentally be stuck in the middle of a road. If you're unlucky enough to be in that situation, that sucks, but you can't ask someone else to die for it. Accidents are a part of reality, we should minimize unfairness rather than minimize loss of utility.
One person getting unlucky and dying is bad, but one person dying because someone else got unlucky is worse, in my opinion. That's twice the unfairness.
No it's not. I doubt that has ever come up with a human driver and probably won't with autonomous drivers either. If it does both humans or robots will probably think oh shit, hit the brakes and hope for the best.
Not only that but driverless cars will disrupt government revenue streams, the workforce, law enforcement etc. every industry will be affected and I don't think people are just going to welcome these changes with open arms.
Sure the tech news is gushing with praise, which fuels publicity for these big companies, but in the real world that media will turn on you in an instant when an incident occurs. There will be a large, active, hostile contingent of the public who depend on their jobs driving to feed their families and they wont just sit by and let their jobs become redundant. This isnt Uber, not by a long shot, this is massive global disruption.
Like any tech venture, it needs to scale successfully to gain world wide dominance. Prove that it works in a particular environment and expand. Sure companies will love the cost savings that come from driveless tech, but the general public, wow that will be a fight.
People will complain. Laws will be passed in backward places. Truckers will protest. Boom, gone.
I quit driving about fifteen years ago, primarily get around on bicycle with the occasional train or Uber. You really need to get locked out of a car for a while to appreciate the weird sense of entitlement that drivers get.
When the streets are full of cars and traffic is slow, well that’s just a fact of life, you mutter and deal with it. But if a bicycle is a driver’s commute by a few seconds, that’s license to go completely bananas. Somehow just the fact that someone owns a car makes them feel like their time is worth more than that of others, that society owes them a speedy drive, convenience, and free parking anywhere.
When people are regularly encased in hermetically sealed wheeled bubbled, they turn into sociopaths.
Unfortunately, when I walk on sidewalks I often feel threatened by the cyclists. They ride too fast, too close to people. They feel entitled and reckless because they have wheels and us only legs to walk. Cyclists sharing a sidewalk are just as bad, or worse compared to drivers sharing a road with cyclists.
The solution would be dedicated cycling paths, but those are a rarity in my city and many of those that exist are just one meter width marked right on the sidewalk, reducing the space for walking. Sometimes the sidewalk is too narrow and people have to enter the cycling path in order to pass, and that's where a self entitled cyclist would run over you just to teach you not to step on his path. That's why I often walk with some anxiety, you never know who's on wheels and what they think they are entitled to do.
I'm nervous cycling my bicycle around London, surrounded by entitled drivers who complain about cyclists at every opportunity but who don't see the problem with texting while driving at speed?
The solution would be to completely rid of cars in cities, and to only allow those who are physically disabled, or those who are highly trained to drive. How long is your commute? 10 miles? that's a 30 minute cycle journey each way (I did that before a hit and run road rage driver stopped me from cycling).
w/r/t the notion that cyclists sharing a sidewalk with pedestrians (a practice I would never condone) is "just as bad" as drivers sharing the road with cyclists, that's just stupid. A two ton machine can kill people. Pedestrians being killed by cyclists is nearly unheard of. It happened once in Central Park last year and the event was so extraordinary that bicycle blogs were talking about it for weeks.
When in doubt, follow the 3 laws for robots
First generation of the self driving vehicle should focus on safe driving in comparison to typical human drivers.
Like we have carpool/hov+ lanes we will start having autonomous lanes
I expect cargo trucks would switch to autonomous due mundane nature of the work and long driving hours
Asimov's 3 Laws were a plot device, not a serious attempt to codify ethics. They were designed to fail for dramatic effect, and his stories were about them failing constantly, because they presented the apparent paradox of a perfectly rational being appearing to behave irrationally.
The only law Asimov's robots actually adhere to is the Law of Unintended Consequences - and I believe this is the actual lesson for autonomous car engineers. The more powerful an AI is, and the more complex it is, and the more likely it is to fail in ways that can't be predicted.