Should your car kill you to save others?

[Slacker]

Except in the example in the post above yours. Oh, and the countless others.

Regardless of the speed the car is tracking at appropriate range and will be able to react as necessary

 

[piasabird]

Well emergency breaking could be deployed, but if you stop too quickly then your vehichle could be slammed into from behind by someone texting on their phone. That will then cause your vehicle to be pushed forward and kill the pedestrian. People can not be saved automatically with any level of certainty.

I had an auto accident that was caused by a person behind me. A lady driving a vehicle slammed into the rear of my car who was not paying attention. I stopped for a light at an intersection and boom she slams into my car and my car hit the car in front of me and the car in front of me hit the car in front of it.

I think the question is should all the insurance companies all sue the cell phone manufacturer and the telephone company that sells a device that makes people addicted to texting, or should texting addiction be considered a mental disease and be blamed for the accident?

 

[piasabird]

Inertia of a moving vehicle can only be stopped so fast.

 

[boomerang]

Inertia of a moving vehicle can only be stopped so fast.

Exactly.

I see no point in arguing with people who have zero understanding of the physics behind the distance it takes to stop a vehicle with a mass of x going y MPH when a pedestrian steps out in front of same vehicle. So I will let them live in the world that they have created for themselves.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

We're losing sight of the bigger picture here and there are more important issues that need to be addressed. Will the cars AI be sophisticated enough to distinguish between pedestrians and cyclists so that it can attempt to miss the pedestrians without losing the ability to intentionally speed up and ram the cyclists?

 

[sdifox]

We're losing sight of the bigger picture here and there are more important issues that need to be addressed. Will the cars AI be sophisticated enough to distinguish between pedestrians and cyclists so that it can attempt to miss the pedestrians without losing the ability to intentionally speed up and ram the cyclists?

Get some Moose Bumper :awe:

 

[DrPizza]

Exactly.

I see no point in arguing with people who have zero understanding of the physics behind the distance it takes to stop a vehicle with a mass of x going y MPH when a pedestrian steps out in front of same vehicle. So I will let them live in the world that they have created for themselves.

Speaking of understanding physics, I think the word he was going for was momentum. Inertia means, more or less, mass. It doesn't mean momentum. The amount of time it takes a car to stop is related to its momentum, and the maximum stopping force that can be applied to the vehicle (friction from braking against the road surface.) So, you were correct in pointing out that the speed matters as well.

 

[shortylickens]

If people just drove the fucking speed limit we wouldnt need most of these moral quandaries.

 

[ALIVE]

so lets see a car driven by computer or robot what ever you prefer
that means it will obey the speed limit at any time
so the areas that is more probably to have pedestrians are the areas the car iwll go with 25miles?? limit?? (not know the limit in usa)
ans since the computer is not disturb by texting or talking that means it looks the road ahead and since it is not human it can have better sensors than humans.
infrared scan with radar?? to identify persons from plain objects???

so with all that said it can not use the breaks??
at slow speed the card is immobilized really fast.

at highways well the chances to find a pedestrians falls

so this is a futile paper to justify someone pay check working in the government

or you can go the rabbit hole and say it is a preparation of the mases to accept in the future vehicles that will be programmed with the option to kill them for the greater good
which will be decided by the government of course

the first time you hear the idea you laugh
the second time you laugh less
but given the time you stop laughing
and after a while you consider it be normal

 

[NuclearNed]

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A guy much smarter than me came up with this... so I'll trust his reasoning

 

[poofyhairguy]

[think of the children]

Obviously if the pedestrian is younger than you you should be sacrificed for the good of our collective future.

[/think of the children]

 

[Slacker]

Stop thinking like humans, the machine is designed to take action appropriate to the circumstances, it doesn't know or care what magically appears in its path, it will react in its own best interest.

 

[WHAMPOM]

A pedestrian steps out in front of your autonomous car. Should the pedestrian be saved or should the car endanger your life to save the pedestrian?

The Self-Driving Dilemma: Should Your Car Kill You To Save Others?

Maybe a menu option you can select depending on your mood that day before you start the car? :twisted:

WE will let Darwin decide, idiot blind pedestrian or conscientious autonomous car owner? Brake to diminish impact or swerve into a blind area? I choose brake.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I wonder if ejector seats would be viable (except obviously in tunnels). Pedestrians walk in way, car lanches you and swerves to avoid pedestrians. Everyone is saved. If car survives, stick the seat back in with new booster jet, drive off.

 

[zinfamous]

Not even a moral question. Get in front of a multi tonne projectile, get mowed down.

this

This. It's a robot's first duty to serve its master. Other people not doing their jobs correctly doesn't affect that.

this

No ones going to buy a car that is going to kill the owner in an accident, what are these stupid authors of these articles thinking?

and that

 

[Ketchup]

I am glad that I am not the only one reminded of I Robot with such a question.

Actually, I think people asking the question are thinking a little too much about said movie.

C'mon people. Is this serious?

How about having an auto-horn active when the car is going over 10 MPH. Done.

 

[zinfamous]

At most, slam the brakes on to reduce impact as much as possible. Anything else is more likely to hurt more people (1 person vs potentially multiple passengers, or maybe swerving takes out another car in the road, etc).

The vehicle would have responded long before it would ever need to slam breaks (automatically slowed when potential threat appears, to eliminate impact if necessary)

----

The major problem that will face the inevitable adoption of driverless cars is that there will be willfully unbalanced comparison of accidents between driverless and human-driven cars.

We are already pretty numb to the actual numbers of real human deaths caused by real humans when they control cars:
90 deaths per day in the US averaged over the last 5 years of data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year

For a driverless car, it will take only one death--probably just one non-fatal injury--to stir public hysteria against the new paradigm. The reality will be that a completely autonomous system will almost certainly reduce deaths and injuries by upwards of 90% or more (understand that even with pedestrians, humans are killing them because they aren't looking or are too slow to react or can't react because they can't see a certain distance in front of them. I driverless car is constantly watching, calculating, and reacting to everything around it, well in advance of when a human would be able to. So an unseen pedestrian on the freeway in the middle of the night--the robot car has already slowed and changed lanes and responded well in advance, as have all other cars in reaction to the object and to the other cars).

People will not easily understand that rates of 90% reduction in fatalities are real, because I think there is a stubborn bias that controlling the car means you control the fate of you and the world around you. That automating that control relinquishes human control and free choice.

In fact, this could not be further from the truth: The act of driving, today, should be understood to be a relinquishing of control of your fate to those around you. Most often, accidents aren't because you chose to drive into another car. It is because some dildo was texting and plowed into you, or thought that merging from one slow-moving lane in traffic to another briefly slow moving lane or speeding down the shoulder is somehow a good idea (no--that is always why the problem exists), or you are distracted for whatever reason and didn't notice that you were driving into that lake or that convoy of orphans on tandem bikes.

Some say, well that was still my action and people should be held responsible for their actions. Humans made that choice to be distracted, and so be it. Well, so be it...but how does that possibly justify the results of those "choices" when it never should have happened in the first place? I won't accept that.

A century of data has proven beyond any doubt that humans simply are not capable of driving in a rational, efficient, and safe way. We are completely irrational and, far more damaging, incurably selfish. It is a modern task that we are woefully incapable of performing. (read: no one drives on roads like in the fantasy car commercials. You don't drive on those lone open roads. No one does. stop pretending. 95% of the world's and 98% of your's and my driving is as one cattle in a herd waiting behind hundreds of other cars or packed behind blinking lights in a city on our way to a daily monkey cage or a warehouse to buy our pallets of food stuffed into cardboard boxes)

We humans have made it plainly clear to the rest of us humans that we would rather be texting or chatting or eating french fries or playing farmville than preventing our vehicles from rending dozens of families fatherless or motherless on any given day. So, if we accept that obvious truth, then what the fuck is the problem with automated driving when we could do all those things that we want to do, not kill people in the process, not jack up their insurance premiums, not sit in traffic for the bulk of our day, not pay exorbitant vehicle costs on sticker prices and stupid sucker loans?

 

[JulesMaximus]

AT would be so lucky as to have my car kill me.

Maybe my motorcycle will do the job though...

 

[clamum]

Seems to me that the car should kill the pedestrians, and then you. That way it kind of evens things out and there's no problem.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Snip

When off the clock, most people would rather act the role of customer rather than act in a professional manner. It is unfortunate that most people do not see driving as an activity that demands a level of professionalism.

Even if self-driving cars never take off, I would like nothing more than for licensing requirements to be tightened up. I think a large part of the Lousy Drivers problem is due to the DMV virtually giving licenses to everyone and their dog. I don't even thing they test for parallel parking anymore.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Actually, I think people asking the question are thinking a little too much about said movie.

C'mon people. Is this serious?

Very very serious. The hypothetical of "does the car hit the kid in the street or does the car run you off the cliff" is pretty much at the center of the debate on self-driving cars right now.

It might be the definition of an edge case, but with hundreds of millions of drivers in the country it will be a daily fact of life.

Plus at some level the biggest impediment to SDCs (self driving cars) isn't the technology, is regulations. And regulations means politics and politics means caring about the edge cases that can capture the imagination of humans.

I mean, a health care panel deciding who will get further health care and who needs to be pushed into hospice doesn't apply to the majority of people. Yet Sarah Palin's "Death Panels" label probably killed the chance for a single payer system in the US in my lifetime. The reason why is because that particular edge case was framed in a way that captured the imagination of the populace (via the word "death"), and made them think about what would happen if it DID apply to them someday.

In the same way if the mothers of the country are fed some BS framing that "SDCs are child murdering machines because they will always put the driver's interests before your little angel making an innocent mistake" then the whole product category is cooked.

Politically we will probably end up with some sort of system where children are given some sort of beacon that tells objects like SDCs they are children and the SDCs will optimize the safety of the beacons over anything else. I just don't see any other way around this question.

 

[balloonshark]

Pedestrian airbag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw8yJjmAU34

 

[FeuerFrei]

Killswitch on the dash - toggles between "self" and "them all"

 

[BurnItDwn]

Meh, even if they lock down the OS of the car like how cell phones are locked down rather than like how you can DIY Linux/BSD on a PC, there will be hacks or at the very least vulnerabilities that you could exploit to get root and change parameters/rules.

Likely every country will have its own autonomous car rules, each state or local area may have its own rules ... thus, the OS of the car will likely store all the laws/rules as some sort of table, you can just hack in and change the rules to suit yourself if you think you are more important than everybody else.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Even if self-driving cars never take off, I would like nothing more than for licensing requirements to be tightened up. I think a large part of the Lousy Drivers problem is due to the DMV virtually giving licenses to everyone and their dog. I don't even thing they test for parallel parking anymore.

That times 1000. Licenses are like a Constitutional right now, they're too easy to get and too hard to lose. The testing requirements should include basic snow driving, skid control, rain/night emergency avoidance, etc.

And texting/DUI should mean automatic suspension on the first offense, permanent license revocation on the second. If we made driving a privilege rather than a right people might take it seriously and do it better so that robotic cars would not be necessary.