I'm curious what we do when we "solve" (hmmm...) the trolley problem and continue to build autonomous machines that take this "problem" into account, however, a machine malfunctions, or is placed in a situation that it could not execute the prescribed outcome for the problem (if that makes sense). Where then do we place the blame?
The perverse incentive was, if I recall correctly, if you maim someone you're responsible for their wellbeing for life. If they are killed, it's a manageable lump sum.
In India, if one has hit a pedestrian, the advice has been to never stop -- you will get beaten up just as worse... just get away from the scene if you can.
"Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects."
In light of this, I think the whole point of the article is maximized. A couple of extremely rare fatalities every few years (hell, even every MONTH) are nothing compared to the carnage and hell we would be avoiding by removing humans as drivers. Until you can make a case that those two types of carnage are even comparable in numbers (which is unlikely), talking about trolleys and who to hit in case of an accident should indeed be reserved for freshman year ethics classes. Note, it's not even an interesting enough ethical problem to make it past Ethics 101 (sort of like, "Will you steal medicine to cure your dying family member?").
I'll say it again, this "discussion" is just bike shedding. [0]
As an example, not everyone can have an opinion on how much of a role deep learning should/will play in a self driving car, of what types of deep learning models we should try, or how we should interface between neral nets and regular code.
But everyone and their mother can talk about trolley problems, it's a mind virus that's existed for 50 years. You tell me more about yourself than about self driving cars.
It's not only philosophical wankery, it's also technological nonsense. It's ridiculous to imagine a self-driving car that can determine that hitting a fat man on the sidewalk would slow the car just enough to avoid killing the girl scouts. If you acknowledge the impossibility of the exact knowledge these problems are framed with they become a lot less "interesting".
Also, sorry for the spoilers, but there's only one correct answer - the car cares about the occupants first in a life and death situation. The car can be pretty sure that it contains humans, but it can't really tell if the suddenly appearing object in the road is a toddler (who the designers might want to prioritize) or a seagull. It's not like we all have IFF transmitters. Given that, unless you want me to be able to kill you by throwing a seagull onto the road in front of your car, it must prioritize the occupants.
> You might get criticized for running over jaywalkers when you could have veered onto the sidewalk, but the former won’t be punished by the law and the latter can be. If people don’t like the law, they should change the law.
Yeesh, the author is asking for a bloodbath. Have you ever been to a city? Jaywalking is just how the world works, and they have de facto ROW. The law is almost entirely irrelevant and is exclusively used to profile minorities.
If we start with the law we start with a broken system. It might allow you to pass the blame in court, but it's not going to save your ass when your shiny car logo has pedestrian blood on it from sprinting through times square.
While this gets way too much attention, there is still some difference between the opportunities, and the law is the last place to look for sanity or rationality.
The author is saying robocars should not veer onto the sidewalk to avoid jaywalkers, not that they should indiscriminately hit them for funsies. If the car can stop for them, it of course would, which is the reality >99% of the time, just like it is for human drivers.
I'm actually kind of looking forward to there being a new selection pressure on a broad population. Especially as this would not be an unfair or targeted out, just... a universal case of, "If you can't handle crosswalks, life is too much for you in general."
Its going to vastly decrease the existing selection pressure of traffic. Robot cars are going to be designed vastly safer then human drivers, because they irrationally scare us more.
It's going to reward people who might otherwise have a very human loss of concentration, and everyone around them. That it might also put pressure on careless pedestrians doesn't bother me too much, in the grand scheme of things.
Some places heavily enforce it and give out fines for it. You will notice that jaywalking is pretty much inexistent there.
I invited someone from such a city over and they outright refused to jaywalk in the small town where I live. "What are you doing? There's no crosswalk here!"
Laws are only as good as your ability to enforce them.
Yes it happens, in some places, so don't try to argue that particular strawman. To extrapolate from that to "Welp!", however, is just sloppy thinking.
EDIT: example: Several years ago a co-worker was driving home, and a woman jaywalked in front of his Escalade (on a street with a posted 40mph speed limit). He watched her head bounce off his hood and she flew like 20-30 feet to land in a heap in the street.
He called 911, and, being like 2 blocks from the nearest fire station, they had a bus and a cruiser on-scene in a few minutes. The responding officer took his statement, and then said something like, "Thank you, sir. Now I'm going to go write her a ticket."
He asked, "Do you have to?"
The officer paused, looked him in the eye, and said, "Sir, you want me to issue her this ticket."
This was in a city of (at the time) maybe 100,000 people, in a flyover state. Very much the kind of place you'd expect jaywalking just to be the norm.
I didn't even think about this, but it probably saved the driver thousands down the proverbial road. Still, for the poor woman it was probably insult to injury.
As a pedestrian, I hate that the law is written such that pedestrians always have the right of way. Nothing pisses me off more than when I walk up towards an intersection, notice that there is a car coming along a hundred yards down the road, with a quarter mile of open space behind it, and I have to do this awkward "don't look like you're trying to cross" dance to get them to just go by and let me cross at my leisure after it is all clear. I really just want to wait my turn and cross when the flow of traffic makes it safe to do so.
I usually go out of my way to cross at places where there aren't crosswalks, because there is usually much better visibility, and people are driving in a more consistent, predictable manner.
Not really, morality =/= legality. I don't want legal self driving cars, I want moral ones. Laws will always be an imperfect implementation of morality. Do self driving cars have to respect the laws of countries that don't respect the rights of minority groups? Should self driving cars in Saudi Arabia prefer to hit women?
Legality isn't an escape hatch that absolves you of the moral implications of your actions.
It isn't, but we're talking about people who are thoughtless and casual in the defense of their own life and health, and choose to jaywalk, not women, or minority groups of some kind. Morally speaking, I find it difficult to fall on the side of people who place the burden of keeping them alive on society at large, out of sheer carelessness.
“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” -Heinlein
You're actually talking about people who do casually defend their own life and health, by choosing to walk.
In actual urban cities (eg NYC, Chicago, Boston), pedestrians are quite capable of informally navigating with cars, crossing at any point of a street rather than waiting for some preposterous "walk light" (and possibly even being expected to push a filthy button to activate it!?). Streets are a shared resource for many types of users, so it is certainly not a given that a single type of traffic should be given utmost blind priority. That kind of thing is an explicit policy decision, and is currently reserved for the few "controlled access" highways.
I think it will be quite unfortunate if the west coast style of "oblivious" driving becomes calcified as code and exported to the rest of the world. Self-driving cars actually represent an opportunity to roll back this fallacious attitude that "streets are for cars", as a self-driving car is much more attentive and will not tire of being vigilant. For example, if your automatic car cannot gauge whether a crossing pedestrian intents to cross in front of or behind it and make a slight speed adjustment (as said pedestrian has already done, and as current human drivers are expected to do), then it deserves to come to a quick stop and wait there like an idiot until you upgrade it to competency.
In line with the original article, I think this whole subject is an utter red herring and an amazing illustration of how the media can manufacture its own concern over a topic just to fill pages. The thought experiment is specifically called the "trolley problem" because trolleys run on discrete tracks and stop slowly. In the real world braking and turning have basically the same avoidance distance, accelerating does not save you from accidents, and people are never expected to drive off cliffs to avoid pedestrians.
The reality, as someone who has lived in all three of those cities, is that pedestrians are adept at making cars navigate them, because they can. It's not that crosswalks (which are ubiquitous in those cities) are somehow burdensome, they just have shit to do and know that drivers don't want to hit them.
These are the same people who just walk into the street without even looking, while on their cell phones.
> These are the same people who just walk into the street without even looking, while on their cell phones.
Obviously the bad actors are going to stand out to you. There are many more people who are attentive when they informally cross, but they blend into traffic and are forgotten about.
I don't know what to do about the recent phenomenon of people spaced out on their phones, but I'm pretty sure changing traffic laws so drivers can explicitly hit them is not a good answer.
(crosswalks aren't burdensome, but the idea that pedestrians should only ever cross in them is, by construction. Why should a pedestrian be made to walk an extra block to simply cross a regular ubiquitous street, when they do not depend on the abstraction that would necessitate it? The "highway revolts" took place for good reason, and changing every street into a controlled access road would essentially resume that damage)
The need to "not die" is a result of a deliberate policy choice, which you're obscuring by making it seem like the pedestrian is the only one choosing.
If we're talking about metaphorical "reigns" meaning control of society, then we definitely should not be handing these over to computers. The goal should be for computers to be responsible to people [0], rather than people being controlled by computers. Otherwise, we are abdicating are own right to exist.
[0] True independent AI would function as its own agent. But I would categorize that as a new "person".
A deliberate policy choice of... allowing cars on roads? Before that it was horse drawn carriages and people on horseback running people down. I'm not clear on the pure policy choice you're referencing.
>The need to "not die" is a result of a deliberate policy choice...
Your earlier statement. Now you're saying that policy (the one you describe as a construction designed to be burdensome earlier) is one you feel I've implied? I've done no such thing. You're the one claiming that the current system is burdensome, don't try to wriggle out of that.
Your tangent meanwhile did not directly address something I said, it addressed an extension of what I said pertaining to vehicles, and expanded it to a society-wide issue. So again... tangent.
Does that include the stupidity of a child chasing a ball into the street? Or a non-native, who fails to understand local jaywalking laws or customs? It certainly seems to include a mentally disabled person who might wander into the road. Seems callous.
How often, in places where there is a great deal of traffic, do children get hit chasing their balls? How often are mentally disabled people wandering around alone, when they're so disabled they can't work out a crosswalk and a red or green light? How often are non-natives struck and injured in these situations?
I ask, because I become immediately suspicious when someone tells me, in so many words, "To think of the children."
Everybody should do what they think is right. But if the government is going to impose limits on the behavior of people, it should do that through laws.
Right - but laws should be based on moral considerations. You can't claim that a certain moral problem is solved just because there is a law that applies to it.
All laws are moral. However, immoral actions may be lawful. This is because laws are basically the fixed set of moral rules for society, while there may be other moral rules not generally agreed upon. I agree with the author, as long as the cars obey the law, there should be no problem.
> All laws are moral. However, immoral actions may be lawful.
Are you saying that there is no such thing as an immoral law? It sounds like from your comment that you're saying: There may be immoral things you can do legally, but legality provides a "base" morality.
Women must keep their face covered in public, Jim Crow laws, etc.
Laws and morals change, and sometimes they are not concomitant. I am speaking of an ideal equilibrium where the law is the manifestation of universally agreed-upon morals. In this case, some may have higher morals than the law requires, but to violate the law would be immoral per se.
Reminds me of something from Aristotle, although he said the converse:
> ...evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts...
> But since unfair and the unlawful are not the same, but are different as a part is from its whole (for all that is unfair is unlawful, but not all that is unlawful is unfair)...
The author is likely right. Self-driving cars will stay in their right of way at all times, and do their best to avoid collisions within that constraint. Departing from the legal right of way to "avoid" a collision will likely be a no-win for liability reasons.
I think this is one of the situations were the intuition of non-engineers should simply be ignored. If we go with the numbers from the article, one fatal accident per 2 million hours driven, and if we assume that this is in the ballpark of trolley problem situation, then we need for the trolley problem detector something like six-nines reliability so that the false positives are just in the same ball park as the true positives. And make no mistake, false positives means that the automatic car decides to kill the group of children even though it could just drive safely. So the best code is the empty line, it executes reliable and predictable, does not introduce bugs and is really fast.
The "right" answer to the question as posed does seem to be for the car not to deviate from its intended lane and right of way. However, the likely conclusion of this technology is streets that are totally unsafe for any kind of illegal crossing. As acceptable mortality thresholds are established, speed limits on automated cars are certain to increase, considering the unchecked thirst for convenience by owners of any technology. Once we have cars whizzing down the road at high speed, with an established social understanding that cars do not cede right of way, streets will essentially become off limits. Compare this to 100 years ago when playing outside and in the street was commonplace and relatively risk free. I'm not a Luddite, but is the freedom we're giving up over our world worth the convenience of automated driving?
Reminds me of Fahrenheit. Bradbury envisioned roads where cars go really really fast, can barely see where they're going since all is a blur. Social norm is that stepping on the road means you die and that you were an idiot for having done it. Cars don't break or swerve for people or animals on road. They might feel inconvenienced by the splash of blood on their car.
Bradbury certainly had a strong sense for how society/technology evolve. Are such accidents worth the cost of essentially creating additional free time for the majority of car-operating humanity? Sorry for the leading question.
A sincere apology if you took my previous post as flippant. If it wasn't clear, I believe we need to think twice any time we value convenience over safety.
I agree, and my reply was also unnecessarily flippant.
Historically speaking, we don't have a good tack record of assessing infrequent but catastrophic risk versus consistent but small reward. As a society we tend to consistently choose the latter. Then try to retroactively reduce probability of catastrophic failure.
This is a decision that can be made city-by-city, I believe. My local suburb has a 10,000 population, so it's not difficult to get a couple hundred people together to petition the city to set speed limits.
New York might be busy enough that there's never empty streets, I don't know.
For cities of a couple million people or less, I imagine so few people petition the city council for adjustments to the traffic law that they'd probably hear your concern.
In New York and California local rules are often / always overruled by the state. New York City can't even change the speed limits without the permission of the state government. It is unlawful for them to install speed enforcement cameras. In states where the state can override cities, it will always happen that convenience-obsessed drivers from suburbs and exurbs will be able to force their worldview on urban areas.
Compared to 100 years ago roads are already pretty locked down, we have traffic lights and dedicated pedestrian crossings. And we're fine with it.
Realistically, speed limits will probably stay low (or might even decrease) in any residential area you'd want to play in. Additional barriers will be put up where parks / schools are located on busy streets. Only arterial roads will see an increase in speed limits.
All of this is decades away, more than enough time to accept the new reality as the norm.
I think you're missing an important detail: human drivers speed, all the time. I live on a small residential street with a speed limit of 25 MPH, and it's not at all uncommon for drivers to take it at 35 MPH--sometimes even at 45. This situation isn't uncommon. Even if the speed limit were to increase slightly, it might still be a net improvement, especially given that robot cars may have better reaction times than human drivers.
A slight speed limit increase, sure. But if cars could move at 100+ mph and keep within an established mortality rate, what would stop us as a society from letting them?
Laws? Many things can be convenient and logical, but a myriad of laws stop such things from taking over our society. I'm sure by the time self driving cars become commonplace designated streets with enforced speed limits will arise in school and residential zones, and self driving cars will (in theory) never speed, unlike human drivers.
You are 90 years too late with your phobia. It's called Autobahn, or Freeway. And whether it's 70, 100, or 150 Mph, they have proven themselves an integral part in our transportation systems. No one is replacing existinf residential 5mph zones with pedestrian right of way with Freeways. We're talking about having a glass of wine and a good view from a sidewindow during your safe trip throughout existing rules of the infrastructute, instead of current "Gas, brake, honk. Brake, brake, honk. Gas, gas, punch". Imagine being more rested on your trip, you could even have mini offices in cars. You won't need to travel 100mph through the city. 25mph will do just fine. And if you need fast, nearest freeway is never too far, just like it isn't now.
Back when city streets were still contested between pedestrians and automobiles, there were many cases of cars going in excess of 40mph on city streets. Due to the many fatalities, people pushed for requiring governors to keep cars from exceeding 30mph, to the resistance of automobile owners. The details of this were in some article posted to HN in the last few years. The result was, instead of governors, making "jaywalking" a crime.
An interesting thing is that NYC has a speed limit of 25mph now.
Good luck getting past 25mph in some parts of the city though. Traffic, pedestrians/jaywalkers, hazards, and stop lights every other block act as a more natural governor.
First and foremost, robocars need to protect their occupants, because if they don't and can decide to self destruct in order to "save" some stranger whose life is "more valuable" according to some algorithm, nobody will ever ride in one, and society will be worse off as a result.
While reading the Obama interview in Wired I come across this:
> ITO: When we did the car trolley problem, we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people. They also said they would never buy a self-driving car. [Laughs.]
They shouldn't laugh, because that's the problem right there. If you think your car can decide to "sacrifice" you under some circumstances, then you will not get into it, and the whole self-driving system doesn't even start.
Exactly, this is the most navel gazing fake moral dilemma. We already know that we could reduce fatalities on the road by reducing speeds and using different types of intersections. We choose to do neither with regularity. Because they would cost time and/or money.
Objectively autonomous vehicles are such a massively huge improvement in our capabilities that we should be taking larger risks than we are currently. We shouldn't be hand wringing about these constructed 'what ifs'. The entirety of our efforts should be focused on pushing the envelope on implementation/execution.
The case for this is actually similar to how damage from vaccines are litigated. Vaccines are objectively a good thing for society. Yet, they do cause harm to a small number of people. So we have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle these claims. These laws also shield the manufacturers from most liability. Now gross negligence isn't going to be covered by this and I'm sure lawyers can find other instances.
This seems like a good concept for self driving vehicles if removing humans makes injuries orders of magnitude less. It won't be perfect, so in those cases a national program for compensation and liability shielding makes sense. Then the technology and be quickly deployed and improved.
A better comparison is the MCCA (Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association) All current auto insurance cases with settlements are reimbursed by the fund for amounts over $545k. If this was expanded to cover self driving cars it would still hold the companies financially responsible for the damage they cause while allowing them to take risks without going out of business.
I participated in a trolley problem test (probably found a link to the test here) a few months back. The point of the test was to determine my ethical biases about how many and which people to kill based on age, sex, fitness, etc.
I found the results meaningless because I don't gauge which action to take based on classifications like age, sex, or societal function. I gauge my actions on total number of lives taken, and which move was the least asshole move to take. If I'm in a certain lane, and I'm guaranteed to kill 3 people in either lane, I stay in my assigned lane because it's an asshole move to switch lanes just because I think [blank] about the people in front of my car. I stay in my lane, kill the same number of people, and deal with the consequences.
Plus driving at any speed, I don't think I can see category well enough to make decisions, except perhaps for babies in buggies that are so visually different. Even then the buggy cart could be filled with junk. So the least asshole move is to stay in my assigned lane and kill the people in front of me. Although I might try to avoid a baby in a buggy / obvious small child because that is one distinction I'd be guaranteed to see at most speeds.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] thread"Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit." http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
Ugh, I started skimming the article again and I can't read it. Just gruesome.
In India, if one has hit a pedestrian, the advice has been to never stop -- you will get beaten up just as worse... just get away from the scene if you can.
As an example, not everyone can have an opinion on how much of a role deep learning should/will play in a self driving car, of what types of deep learning models we should try, or how we should interface between neral nets and regular code.
But everyone and their mother can talk about trolley problems, it's a mind virus that's existed for 50 years. You tell me more about yourself than about self driving cars.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Also, sorry for the spoilers, but there's only one correct answer - the car cares about the occupants first in a life and death situation. The car can be pretty sure that it contains humans, but it can't really tell if the suddenly appearing object in the road is a toddler (who the designers might want to prioritize) or a seagull. It's not like we all have IFF transmitters. Given that, unless you want me to be able to kill you by throwing a seagull onto the road in front of your car, it must prioritize the occupants.
Yeesh, the author is asking for a bloodbath. Have you ever been to a city? Jaywalking is just how the world works, and they have de facto ROW. The law is almost entirely irrelevant and is exclusively used to profile minorities.
If we start with the law we start with a broken system. It might allow you to pass the blame in court, but it's not going to save your ass when your shiny car logo has pedestrian blood on it from sprinting through times square.
While this gets way too much attention, there is still some difference between the opportunities, and the law is the last place to look for sanity or rationality.
The author is saying robocars should not veer onto the sidewalk to avoid jaywalkers, not that they should indiscriminately hit them for funsies. If the car can stop for them, it of course would, which is the reality >99% of the time, just like it is for human drivers.
Some places heavily enforce it and give out fines for it. You will notice that jaywalking is pretty much inexistent there.
I invited someone from such a city over and they outright refused to jaywalk in the small town where I live. "What are you doing? There's no crosswalk here!"
Laws are only as good as your ability to enforce them.
Definitely not main streets though, that would be like playing frogger on the hardest difficulty. Already feel like I'm playing it at crosswalks.
Yes it happens, in some places, so don't try to argue that particular strawman. To extrapolate from that to "Welp!", however, is just sloppy thinking.
EDIT: example: Several years ago a co-worker was driving home, and a woman jaywalked in front of his Escalade (on a street with a posted 40mph speed limit). He watched her head bounce off his hood and she flew like 20-30 feet to land in a heap in the street.
He called 911, and, being like 2 blocks from the nearest fire station, they had a bus and a cruiser on-scene in a few minutes. The responding officer took his statement, and then said something like, "Thank you, sir. Now I'm going to go write her a ticket."
He asked, "Do you have to?"
The officer paused, looked him in the eye, and said, "Sir, you want me to issue her this ticket."
This was in a city of (at the time) maybe 100,000 people, in a flyover state. Very much the kind of place you'd expect jaywalking just to be the norm.
I didn't even think about this, but it probably saved the driver thousands down the proverbial road. Still, for the poor woman it was probably insult to injury.
I usually go out of my way to cross at places where there aren't crosswalks, because there is usually much better visibility, and people are driving in a more consistent, predictable manner.
Not really, morality =/= legality. I don't want legal self driving cars, I want moral ones. Laws will always be an imperfect implementation of morality. Do self driving cars have to respect the laws of countries that don't respect the rights of minority groups? Should self driving cars in Saudi Arabia prefer to hit women?
Legality isn't an escape hatch that absolves you of the moral implications of your actions.
“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” -Heinlein
In actual urban cities (eg NYC, Chicago, Boston), pedestrians are quite capable of informally navigating with cars, crossing at any point of a street rather than waiting for some preposterous "walk light" (and possibly even being expected to push a filthy button to activate it!?). Streets are a shared resource for many types of users, so it is certainly not a given that a single type of traffic should be given utmost blind priority. That kind of thing is an explicit policy decision, and is currently reserved for the few "controlled access" highways.
I think it will be quite unfortunate if the west coast style of "oblivious" driving becomes calcified as code and exported to the rest of the world. Self-driving cars actually represent an opportunity to roll back this fallacious attitude that "streets are for cars", as a self-driving car is much more attentive and will not tire of being vigilant. For example, if your automatic car cannot gauge whether a crossing pedestrian intents to cross in front of or behind it and make a slight speed adjustment (as said pedestrian has already done, and as current human drivers are expected to do), then it deserves to come to a quick stop and wait there like an idiot until you upgrade it to competency.
In line with the original article, I think this whole subject is an utter red herring and an amazing illustration of how the media can manufacture its own concern over a topic just to fill pages. The thought experiment is specifically called the "trolley problem" because trolleys run on discrete tracks and stop slowly. In the real world braking and turning have basically the same avoidance distance, accelerating does not save you from accidents, and people are never expected to drive off cliffs to avoid pedestrians.
These are the same people who just walk into the street without even looking, while on their cell phones.
Obviously the bad actors are going to stand out to you. There are many more people who are attentive when they informally cross, but they blend into traffic and are forgotten about.
I don't know what to do about the recent phenomenon of people spaced out on their phones, but I'm pretty sure changing traffic laws so drivers can explicitly hit them is not a good answer.
(crosswalks aren't burdensome, but the idea that pedestrians should only ever cross in them is, by construction. Why should a pedestrian be made to walk an extra block to simply cross a regular ubiquitous street, when they do not depend on the abstraction that would necessitate it? The "highway revolts" took place for good reason, and changing every street into a controlled access road would essentially resume that damage)
A fact that should be increasingly relevant as the reigns are slowly handed over to computers.
If we're talking about metaphorical "reigns" meaning control of society, then we definitely should not be handing these over to computers. The goal should be for computers to be responsible to people [0], rather than people being controlled by computers. Otherwise, we are abdicating are own right to exist.
[0] True independent AI would function as its own agent. But I would categorize that as a new "person".
The rest of your post is a complete tangent.
My "tangent" directly addressed something you said.
Your earlier statement. Now you're saying that policy (the one you describe as a construction designed to be burdensome earlier) is one you feel I've implied? I've done no such thing. You're the one claiming that the current system is burdensome, don't try to wriggle out of that.
Your tangent meanwhile did not directly address something I said, it addressed an extension of what I said pertaining to vehicles, and expanded it to a society-wide issue. So again... tangent.
I ask, because I become immediately suspicious when someone tells me, in so many words, "To think of the children."
Are you saying that there is no such thing as an immoral law? It sounds like from your comment that you're saying: There may be immoral things you can do legally, but legality provides a "base" morality.
Women must keep their face covered in public, Jim Crow laws, etc.
> ...evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts...
> But since unfair and the unlawful are not the same, but are different as a part is from its whole (for all that is unfair is unlawful, but not all that is unlawful is unfair)...
–Nicomachean Ethics, Book V
Sorry for the loaded answer.
Historically speaking, we don't have a good tack record of assessing infrequent but catastrophic risk versus consistent but small reward. As a society we tend to consistently choose the latter. Then try to retroactively reduce probability of catastrophic failure.
New York might be busy enough that there's never empty streets, I don't know.
For cities of a couple million people or less, I imagine so few people petition the city council for adjustments to the traffic law that they'd probably hear your concern.
Realistically, speed limits will probably stay low (or might even decrease) in any residential area you'd want to play in. Additional barriers will be put up where parks / schools are located on busy streets. Only arterial roads will see an increase in speed limits.
All of this is decades away, more than enough time to accept the new reality as the norm.
Please note: even zero-emissions vehicles output tire particulate which exacerbates many allergies/asthma.
An interesting thing is that NYC has a speed limit of 25mph now.
> ITO: When we did the car trolley problem, we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people. They also said they would never buy a self-driving car. [Laughs.]
They shouldn't laugh, because that's the problem right there. If you think your car can decide to "sacrifice" you under some circumstances, then you will not get into it, and the whole self-driving system doesn't even start.
Objectively autonomous vehicles are such a massively huge improvement in our capabilities that we should be taking larger risks than we are currently. We shouldn't be hand wringing about these constructed 'what ifs'. The entirety of our efforts should be focused on pushing the envelope on implementation/execution.
This seems like a good concept for self driving vehicles if removing humans makes injuries orders of magnitude less. It won't be perfect, so in those cases a national program for compensation and liability shielding makes sense. Then the technology and be quickly deployed and improved.
Accidents and lawsuits will be handled and paid for by the same people that handle them right now.
They will be handled by the insurance companies.
Except now, the insurance companies will be paying an order of magnitude less money due to the safety increase.
I found the results meaningless because I don't gauge which action to take based on classifications like age, sex, or societal function. I gauge my actions on total number of lives taken, and which move was the least asshole move to take. If I'm in a certain lane, and I'm guaranteed to kill 3 people in either lane, I stay in my assigned lane because it's an asshole move to switch lanes just because I think [blank] about the people in front of my car. I stay in my lane, kill the same number of people, and deal with the consequences.
Plus driving at any speed, I don't think I can see category well enough to make decisions, except perhaps for babies in buggies that are so visually different. Even then the buggy cart could be filled with junk. So the least asshole move is to stay in my assigned lane and kill the people in front of me. Although I might try to avoid a baby in a buggy / obvious small child because that is one distinction I'd be guaranteed to see at most speeds.