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.
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.
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.
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.
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.