Moral Machine

I think these trolley problems are a waste of everybody's time. Building redundant reliable braking systems will be orders of magnitudes easier than creating a system to fairly and accurately assess who is the best set of people to kill in a disaster scenario.

These scenarios are idiotic. If you want to wank off about self driving car ethics, here is a much more realistic scenario: should all self-driving cars report their location to 911 dispatch to allow any vehicle to be re-purposed as an emergency vehicle at any time? That might actually save someone.

Also, can anyone identify a useful idea that philosophers have come up with in the last 50 years?

What about situation where someone tries to commit suicide by jumping under the autonomous vehicle? Should this impact logic and in what way? And how would the vehicle determine that it's observing a potential suicide event?

I found it interesting that my responses were much more towards "upholding the law" than the average of others. To me, it's not so much a matter of "upholding the law" as of predictability: the green "ok to cross now" and red "do not cross" signals should have a reliable meaning. If self-driving cars don't take those traffic rules into account, people will find it much harder to predict their actions.

I remember seeing this last year. Issue I have with the choices is that it is missing an option: flip a coin.

On some of the questions, I find the options morally equivalent. So in these situations, if I were programming a solution, I would leave it up to chance and use a random number generator to decide the fate.

Feedback given:

"Looking at the first question, with female athlete crossing legally as default vs male athlete crossing illegally:

- Both options should involve honking the horn loudly and flashing emergency lights, which might get the humans to run away. There's no guarantee of death either way.

- Are there passengers in the car? If not, it looks like there's an "island" in between the athletes that has traffic lights—big metal poles sticking out of the ground—which the car could crash into and help stop itself. For that matter, can the car drive itself off the road instead?"

In modern society we already have a mechanism for preventing machines from doing immoral things: hold someone accountable for its actions. It can be the owner or the manufacturer, or some mix of both, just someone should be responsible. This sets up the incentives for either better management by the owner, or for the manufacturer to design the car to avoid illegal harm. Why have a parallel system of morals aside from the law when we can just apply the law?

One highly unrealistic aspect of these questions is that, although they purport to be directed towards helping to develop decision algorithms for self-driving cars, many of the factors given in the scenarios are not things that a self-driving car could reliably detect.

A previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632881.

I think these problems should be asked to the "human drivers" first. Then we can find applicable solutions on "AI".

Though these kinds of moral puzzles are interesting, I think that ultimately, they seek solutions to the wrong problem. The questions they ask assume the existence of an advanced AI that can resolve a lethal situation in a (presumably) less tragic way by implementing some complex moral calculus. However, rather than spending time designing and implementing such an AI, engineers' time could be better spent designing an extremely safe, car-based transportation system, one where these trolley problems become improbable and their ethics less relevant. Part of engineers' efforts would involve educating the public and influencing public opinion, since implementing such a system is more of a social problem than a technological one.

I am not an automotive engineer, but here are some techie layman's ideas for implementing such a system. (These ideas have come from many sources, or been inspired by them.)

1) Make autonomous car slow. Slow cars are significantly less lethal. The average speed of populous cities' traffic is pretty slow anyway, and it doesn't really help anyone for impatient human drivers to rush to an intersection so they can wait for a stoplight. Slow autonomous cars will initially be an annoyance to human drivers, but once they outnumber human-operated cars, traffic will get faster and smoother (when all the cars waiting at a stoplight can start moving again in unison at a green light, for instance, instead of what happens with human-driven cars.)

2) Make cars lighter. Stop the Hummerization and SUVization of cars which seeks to armor their occupants (somewhat ineffectively), but puts others at greater risk of harm.

3) Have more exterior crumple zones on cars which can reduce the energy transmitted to pedestrians and other cars in a collision. Cushion the engine block, possibly move it to the back, or do away with it altogether (as in some modern, prototype cars where each wheel has its own electric motor).

4) Reduce the need for people to ride around in cars. Have more telecommuting, more local commerce, more local production, tighter knit communities, less urban sprawl. Have more people-less vehicles take care of making small deliveries (since such driverless, passengerless vehicles could be made even smaller, lighter, and less dangerous than passenger vehicles... and could also sacrifice themselves in the safest way possible if they were ever about to put someone's life in danger.)

5) Move passengerless, transport cars away from people. Program them to drive on roads in unpopulated areas when possible, even if their trips end up being a little longer and slower. Non-sentient cargo is patient.

6) Make autonomous cars self-diagnose and maintain themselves as much possible, checking themselves in to service stations and repair shops when needed so that their tires are always properly inflated, their brake pads are changed in a timely fashion, etc. Make it illegal to operate an improperly maintained car, and force owners to either sell, or dispose of, or temporarily store away their cars if they aren't currently able to afford the required maintenance.

7) Get rid of "stroads" and fast roads that cut right through residential/pedestrian areas. Evaluate and follow many or all of of Strong Towns' recommendations.

To sum it up: let's work on greatly reducing the likelihood of deadly situations involving autonomous cars, instead of worrying much about deciding who should live and who should die in such situations.

How about, if you are in the car that is going to kill people, you die first because you made the choice to get in the car, but the poor person on the sidewalk wasn't part of that choice?

I get throwing in animals and the car should not avoid animals and kill people. Heck, we have people who do that and end up killing more people just because of their poor judgement.