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kortex

I found myself following a heuristic that is basically Asimov's laws:

- whenever possible, do no harm

- do not let harm occur due to inaction

- when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate

- higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)

- deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions)

It kind of really brings to bear how much of a thematic device the 3 laws are. There's no way to make them congruent with actual, messy, real-world situations. Also why the whole "self-driving car trolly problem" is a non-issue - there will never be a situation where the "AI" has nice neat consequences and a binary choice laid out in front of it. It's always going to be some collection of "preserve life as best as possible" heuristics.

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There's a (famous?) quote from a google engineer Andrew Chatham who worked on self driving cars. When asked about the trolley problem, he said "It takes some of the intellectual intrigue out of the problem, but the answer is almost always ‘slam on the brakes’” [0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/22/self-driv...

You could adjust the question to be “the brakes have failed and..” to avoid that out.

I know, you try to save the trolley scenario. But if brakes fail then it doesn't matter what the AI (or driver) decides. To blame is the one who is responsible for the brakes not to fail.

What? There are still a lot of tactics a driver (or AI) can follow to improve the outcome if the brakes fail, such as swerving to avoid dangerous things while the vehicle naturally coasts to a stop, intentionally driving into a soft thing or up a hill if available (eg runaway truck ramp or a pile of haybales) or in the worst case, decide which of two bad things to run into is less bad. Not making a choice is a choice too, as in the trolley problem, it means you'll hit whatever is straight in front.

So in that sense it's quite relevant. Great, you can usually just apply the brakes. What if you can't or don't have enough following distance? (less common for an AI driver that will try to leave enough distance, but that's not entirely in your own control; another driver can merge in front of you at any time they wish and if an incident occurs before you can increase the distance, you will effectively have to swerve since you won't have enough braking capacity.

It is worthwhile to take a look at dashcam videos (eg, youtube, reddit) to get an idea of the many, many complex scenarios a driver can find themselves in in which a crash is imminent, but the driver has many options and must decide what strategy to take to get the least bad outcome.

But there are still plenty of either/or scenarios with a perfectly functional vehicle because there are other people on the road. Some of the interesting ones involve whether it is the AI car's responsibility to the drivers/passengers in the car first versus everyone else.

For example, a car swerves in front of you (or runs a red light, or whatever) and the car hits the brakes but knows it will not be enough to stop running in to the car. Do they swerve off the road where they might kill a pedestrian, but will definitely save the driver or do you continue to crash in to the other car which may kill the driver of one or both cars.

Is the trolley scenario intended as a blame-finding simulation? I thought it was more like “what (ethical) choice do you make in a difficult situation” deal.

You surely still have some agency after your brakes failed. Or at least if it happened to me I wouldn’t let go of the wheel to find out if I hit group A or B, confident in the knowledge that who or whatever I plow into it is not my fault and all choices from that point are equal.

True, I imagine the next course of action would be something like "do nothing" — continue straight, try to be predictable, hope that other people in the situation can react accordingly.

If we are still doing the trolley problem it would be “the brakes have failed, and … do you continue straight and definitely hit A, or turn the wheel and definitely hit B”.

You should not change lanes unless it is safe to do so. The car should let off the gas, put on hazards and try to move to the side of the road. I am with the other engineers, the trolley problem does not apply here. Why waste effort deciding who lives and who dies when more time can be spent figuring out how to handle these situations safely?

Sure, that still works as a purely abstract problem.

But when it comes to self-driving cars, the answer is that it doesn't really matter.

> - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)

Choosing between preserving the life of one cat vs one lobster seems straightforward enough. But the trolley problem was asking whether one cat was more valuable than five lobsters. According to the stats, many people agreed, but how about one cat vs a million lobsters? Or one cat vs all the lobsters on earth? Most people would think that making lobsters extinct would be very bad (unless they really hate lobsters).

The difficulty is when we can no longer rely on intuition and have to come up with a precise exchange rate of when one being's life is more valuable than another's, which, like you say, is impossible to do in the complicated world we live in and our limited understanding of consciousness and neuroscience. In absence of that, deferring to the first law "whenever possible, do no harm" seems sensible.

I chose to kill the cat, because there are too many of them and they devastate natural ecosystems, killing birds for instance. Lobsters on the other hand are badly depopulated. In both cases undoing a wrong committed by humanity.

This is prominent in the elderly or children tests. Older people have gifts of experience that can be invaluable to the rest of us, especially when broadly shared. Children have great potential but through most of human history have been relatively cheap, easy to replace, and more of a value sink than generator.

I wish the featured page did more of this

> - whenever possible, do no harm

> - do not let harm occur due to inaction

Trolley problems, of course, are designed to bring these into direct conflict.

Enough context is lacking. That's kind of what makes it all absurd. Take the cat vs. lobsters. Did you know felis catus is responsible for the extinction of some 37 species of birds world wide mostly due to colonization. They're not indigenous predators to the North Americas and enjoy the protections and long life afforded by their proximity to humans while killing for entertainment.

Lobsters on the other hand? Useful in their natural environments, have not become an invasive apex predator, could go on and feed many people too if properly managed and allowed to live their lives.

Yet the majority of people saved the cat thinking it's a "higher life form."

A bit absurd. Also the idea of trolleys without brakes and levers and cats that can't move off the track in the face of on-coming danger.

If we are to judge ethically, one particular cat should not be punished for the sins of the cat species. As far as we know this particular cat didn't do nothing.

Then we need to talk about criminal liability. In the sense that a cat can't stop itself from killing birds. We don't punish toddlers if they kill a bird, because they don't understand that they shouldn't.

Also, the whole idea of "native species" is highly subjective. What is "native species" today maybe it was an "invasive species" yesterday.

You're probably doing the local fauna a favour by eliminating the cat. The cat will kill other animals purely for amusement (by killing it and not eating it). It enjoys a longer lifespan than most local predators due to their proximity to humans that care about their well-fare, enabling them to kill more and for longer than any local predator. Stray cats are estimated to be the largest contributor to declining bird and mammal populations [0].

Also, in the city I live in, outdoor cats are illegal regardless of registration (which is also required).

The lobsters on the other hand, if you live near a coastal city to their native habitat, could be reintroduced and improve the local ecosystem.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

> You're probably doing the local fauna a favour by eliminating the cat.

One could have said the same thing when mammals appeared. Not to mention humans: "These human species will ruin the ecosystem. We better eliminate it now before it spreads".

Said otherwise, you are thinking about the narrow interest of the day, without considering if the ideology makes sense in itself.

> Nativism is the political policy of promoting or protecting the interests of native or indigenous inhabitants over those of immigrants, including the support of immigration-restriction measures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_(politics)

We're talking about cats here and ecology not human politics.

You're mistaking natural movements of species into new ecological systems with humans literally transplanting cats across the globe.

It's a fact that on some islands we settled, when we brought cats with us, those cats literally drove entire species of birds native to that island into extinction. The cats didn't walk across water or build ships to get there. They were brought there by humans and did what cats do.

This conversation is starting to get a bit absurd.

If the lobsters are tied to a trolley track, they aren't long for this world anyway. Trolley tracks aren't exactly a lobster's native habitat.

Untie the cat and it'll, likely, be a-ok.

Take out the cat though and you have dinner for 5 families!

Having dinner is precisely why I took out the lobsters (well, depending they're not too mangled after being run over by a trolley).

> deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions)

Yep, I sent that trolley into the future just in case some time in the future they invent a cure for getting run over by trolleys

Soock was wrong — this is not how rational people behave. Rational people preserve their own life. If they die, the consequences of their choices can no longer matter to them. A cat isn't going to affect my longevity, but a cat is more likely to be a pet than five lobsters, and the emotional distress of the owner will have some greater expected impact on my longevity than the lesser distress of the lobster fisher who lost $60 from their catch.

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