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Comment by satyavh | Hacker News Reader

Even if it will be technically possible, and I'm pretty sure some day that will be solved. That's the easiest part.

The biggest hurdle for self-driving cars will be ethics, such as 'the car brakes for a child suddenly crossing the street but then kills the old woman' or perhaps even make decisions based upon social status. Lots of options here.

Those ethics have to be agreed upon, and they will likely differ per culture, state, country, etc. It's a political and sociological challenge. It will be interesting crossing borders.

And then those ethics need to be implemented in software. I would refrain from saying it's never going to happen, but I doubt very much this will happen in our lifetime.

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I believe that this scenario is very over-blown. If you're in a situation where you have to choose between swerving into another car or hitting a child that darts out onto the street then the question really is: why were you in that situation in the first place? At 20mph pedestrian collisions are almost invariably non-fatal and emergency stops are almost instantaneous. So if you're on a street where a child can appear instantly, why are you going faster than 20mph in the first place?

a child can appear instantly on any street. they can even run into the highway if their parent pulls onto the shoulder for a bathroom break or something.

of course, it's much more likely to happen in a neighborhood than on the highway, so we drive slower in the neighborhood. but anything that can happen eventually will, so there ought to be some policy.

that said, I think there is a certain segment of the population that gets overly excited about mapping the trolley problem onto autonomous driving. I expect that little will change other than the liable party (the car driver vs the company) and it will mostly work out.

Exactly. The maximum safe speed in a neighborhood is 20mph, and the maximum safe speed passing a stopped car on the freeway is a lot less than 60mph.

sure, but I don't think the whole highway is obligated to slow down for a stopped car on the right shouler, only the lane next to the shoulder (and I would argue that this lane suddenly slowing all the way down to 20mph would create a worse hazard). theoretically the child could make it all the way to to left before being struck. I'm not saying this is likely, just that there is no speed where you can guarantee that you won't hit a pedestrian that is behaving erratically. the best you can do is make it very unlikely in most cases.

No, the Trolley Problem will not be the biggest (or even a significant) hurdle until AI is so good that it's a moot point anyway. Self driving cars will do what humans do - they'll brake as hard as possible while trying to steer away from anything they're going to hit. If we're lucky they may distinguish between moving and non-moving objects and prefer to hit the latter on the assumption that the former are more important.

    if (going_to_crash()) stop();

The only ethical decision a self driving car has to make is to not actively kill people. What you are proposing sounds to me to be merely a way to stealthily kill people you don't like with self driving vehicles and then use the "ethical decision engine" to gain plausible deniability. To make decisions about "social status" you need a database of people and their "social status". So where are you going to find a database of people with low "social status"? Well every prison and police station has one and oh and for good measure we can also add some skin color detection because that type of analysis can be done in real time.

Or we could just build better self driving cars and accept that some people will be killed but in exchange they maintain the agency to improve their chances of survival instead of being randomly killed on the sidewalk because some stupid idiot wanted to shave off 3 seconds by jaywalking. Just do stupid shit, the car will kill someone else anyway.

The idea that we should encourage a moral hazard like this strikes me as incredibly disgusting.

We don’t currently have those ethics codified now and it doesn’t seem like too big a problem. I think very few situations actually arise where someone has the time to decide between killing two different individuals.

I strongly disagree. The philosophical issues are exaggerated. It’s the practical ones that matter and where the real hard work lays

How about a gunman stopping the car. Will the car just let the passengers be robbed or executed mafia-style? (I'm rewatching The Sopranos)

I've always wondered why more attention isn't paid to this. A driver's ability to make a decision to run over a possible assailant is a huge deterrent that is not fully appreciated. To an autonomous vehicle all people will look the same and they will have to stop.

I'm most curious about the self-driving trucks. If they are driving across the country through sparsely populated areas, what is to stop a group of robbers from making a chain on the road that forces the autonomous truck to stop and then offloading the cargo? Legally, this would not be considered "robbery" since there is no person involved. As anybody who has driven is USA knows, time and distance would be on your side in the crime as there are tons of backroads and different routes to make a clean getaway...

All those sensors on the truck will be very useful to police investigators afterwards. Sure they make off with cargo, but theft is illegal even if it isn't robbery. The police are generally pretty good (despite the real cases of bad apples). In most cases "the cops say they know who but there is no proof" (obscure Stan Rogers reference), and the truck will upload the proof they need in real time.

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