Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas

theguardian.com

7 points·okket··5 comments

The trolley problem is unlikely to come up. If a car has one pedestrian in the lane in front of it and two in the other it will probably just hit the brakes and I guess the pedestrian can jump out of the way if he's nimble.

There are moral dilemmas that do come up though. Should Tesla be live with it's autopilot if it may be more dangerous than human driving at the moment but where the research value will save lives in the future, for example.

We need some law that makes it ok for it to do that. I'd suggest that any autopilot should attempt to stay on the road surface or shoulder only, to eliminate exotic cases of "if it had only driven into the ditch!" trolly-car issues.

May be naive but wouldn't the emergence of automated vehicles push cities to change their design to eliminate the normal case where pedestrians and vehicles share any road at all?

It wouldn't happen overnight, but I would think that ultimately you would want to get pedestrians out of the way to improve efficiency of travel. I dunno

I don't see why automated vehicles would cause this redesign to happen when human drivers haven't.

If anything, it seems like they would make sharing the road more common, because a reasonably reliable self-driving car would be safer around impromptu crosswalks and the like than many human drivers.

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