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Comment by vishvananda | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or does solving the moral dilemma of prioritization based on attributes of the person seem like a worthless endeavor? In practice, I can't come up with a case where it would matter.

For example, a more reasonable metric for a machine to use is the probability of injury/death. If swerving is 90% likely to kill a person and staying straight is only 89% likely, then staying straight is a better choice. I don't see how attributes of the person would ever trump the probability of harm. The cases where probability is roughly equal for multiple actions will be incredibly rare.

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89% percent chance to kill homeless person or 90% chance to kill pregnant woman?

> I don't see how attributes of the person would ever trump the probability of harm.

Maybe they shouldn't, maybe they should. How do we know? What are the terminal values? Society effectiveness? Or equality of all humans? Or minimizing public outcry in cases when autonomous car killed someone?

> The cases where probability is roughly equal for multiple actions will be incredibly rare.

With millions of autonomous cars on streets rare outcomes would happen all the time.

Do you expect a person to be able to solve that problem? Would you fault a person for not solving it the way you want it solved? If not, why should a driverless car?

>89% percent chance to kill homeless person or 90% chance to kill pregnant woman?

Just fat, or pregnant? We need to know! Get onto it, engineers!

The car's algorithm for deciding this question is a matter of life or death!

/s of course, because I think this whole philosophical argument about self-driving cars is ridiculous when our current tech can't even reliably determine if an object is a stationary barrier or not.

What’s the reliability of the risk assessment?

If you child died because there was a 1% higher projected chance that two people would be killed in a collision... would that seem just?

I think the insistence on experimenting with autonomous driving outside of controlled access highways is insane.

And what about the family of those two people?

I don't understand the insistence of bringing everything back to "what if it was your child." Pretty much everybody has family, and friends, and all that. I'm not sure how somebody being a child of somebody is supposed to be a rational argument for adjusting any of our thinking. As far as I can tell, it's basically the ultimate appeal to emotion.

It’s a call to humanity, not emotion.

When you’re talking about selecting who dies with a 1% margin with some ML process with an unknown margin of error, I question your judgement.

I don't see how it's a call to humanity. "Think if it was your kid vs two strangers" isn't calling on humanity. It's calling on familial tribalism and selfishness if anything.

And obviously, in the real world, a ML-given estimate with a 1% variance is probably entirely useless. In these sorts of hypotheticals,I'm not sure why that really matters. You can play with the numbers as you want, or even move the whole question out far enough into the future that the margin of error can be considered very low. The question remains the same.

We let teenagers drive.

I think it is easy enough to predict that all the systems will do is prioritize avoiding pedestrians while minimizing collision energy otherwise. A 30 mph collision will mess up a pedestrian. It won't be a big deal for restrained passengers.

If it is frequently the case that autonomous systems have to pick between pedestrians, that points to traffic control changes, not a philosophy engine in the car.

It's the ultimate bikeshed. The only winning move is not to play.

I will posit that killing a 9-year old or a 29-year old is actually worse than killing a 99-year old, all else being equal.

(I would hold this view even if I were the 99-year old.)

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