If your vehicle is heading relentlessly toward a group of schoolchildren it would be nice to have a way to override it. Either that or no windows so you won't be haunted by it every night of your life.
I think the real concern that the car is actually programmed explicitly to kill you if it has to, to ensure it's own safety or the safety of it's riders or something.
If a car is programmed that way, how does that benefit the car company (or the programmer)? It's just a different family that sues them if someone dies that didn't have to die. Are you thinking they could advertise it as "prioritizes your life more than random other people!" That's just begging for a lawsuit.
And they especially wouldn't program the car to protect itself above a human life. Why would you think it would? The car is not nearly valuable enough to outweigh the cost of a lawsuit.
Comparing a car programmed for self preservation versus a human seeking their self preservation only really makes sense if the car and human are both equally capable of assessing threats.
At the moment I don't think cars are at the same level. Maybe I'm wrong. Humans are fallible too of course.
But that's not what you said. You said you were concerned about its agenda, that it would be intentionally prioritize the lives of its passengers over other lives (and even suggested it would prioritize the preservation of the vehicle itself more highly)
you said....
>I think the real concern that the car is actually programmed explicitly to kill you if it has to, to ensure it's own safety or the safety of it's riders or something.
My comment was about that....the "agenda" issue, which is 100% what your comment was about.
To be clear (if I wasn't in a previous message)
There is NO incentive for it to be explicitly programmed to do that, since the company could be equally sued by pedestrians as it could by passengers.
There IS incentive for a human to behave that way, since natural selection built a self protection motivation deeply into the human brain.
There is also very strong incentive AGAINST prioritizing protection of the vehicle itself over any human -- passenger or not. For both human drivers and driving software programmers.
Anyway, you seem to be changing your argument to one of competence, which to me is a completely different discussion. (I think self driving cars are better at some things and humans are better at other things, but eventually cars will be better -- or at least equal -- for the vast majority)
And no, this isn't "junior-developer grade software routine." They also don't want the car slamming on its brakes in the middle of traffic because a plastic bag blew by in front of the car.
I don't know what to say.
We can't do that with humans; instead, we have probabilities and known badly-designed roads that incentivize (or don't disincentivize) driving in a way likelier to cause death. The only way to fix those issues at scale is redesign the roads, often for less efficient traffic throughput.
I think it’s sensible not to optimize to the person with the most trauma.
I hope she reconsiders naming her daughter for the girl who died tragically.
My sister was named for a cousin that, as a baby, fell out a window to her death, a decade or so before my sister was born. When my sister was a couple weeks old, my parents realized that they didn't want to think of that tragic story every time they said my sister's name. So they changed her name to one without the emotional baggage.
There are other ways to honor someone's memory, that don't affect your relationship with your new child.
Spoken like someone who has never been a parent.
I do agree tho, “no steering wheel, no responsibility” should be explicit in law.
If the owner is responsible for any deaths caused by their car, the owner will have an incentive to choose a car that has a good safety record, and to keep that car in proper working order.
Conversely, if a corporation is responsible, they can only be punished with fines for causing a fatal accident, and those fines will be considered a cost of doing business. Also, the corporation will have a lot more money to invest in lobbying for laws (and judges) to make those fines as small as possible.
Let us not forget the infamous "Pinto Memo":
https://www.spokesman.com/blogs/autos/2008/oct/17/pinto-memo...
Well, I meant “no responsibility for the passengers”.
The owner should have some limited liability as you say, but primarily liability should be with the manufacturer. The way I view it AVs should have similar liability as an elevator. The manufacturer and the maintainer should have liability, but never the passengers.
Ideally, the manufacturer keeps enough sensors on the thing such that the car doesn’t move without the proper maintenance. But at that point is it truly ownership?
My preference is to just have many services competing that make them relatively cheap.