Barak Obama wants to solve robocar "Trolley Problems"
ideas.4brad.com
ideas.4brad.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.