Posted on 08/16/2017 8:27:55 PM PDT by Lorianne
You can go on and on but they get sillier and sillier as you go. The simple fact of the matter is software has been solving Trolley Problems for 40 years. And the basic solution is ALWAYS THE SAME (and BTW is also the path YOU should take): go the path of longest time because it gives the most opportunity for the situation to resolve itself. It’s not that big a deal. In reality 99% of the people in the world go their entire lives without running into a real world Trolley Problem, and without knowing anyone that did either. So in reality humans DON’T make these, because they simply never have to. We TALK about them, often incessantly, but we don’t actually do them. And on the off chance we do, it’s so bang bang fast we don’t even know we made the decision (and of course don’t even have the information for your most silly example, how are we supposed to know there are killers in the car, by the time you’ve counted heads you’ve probably already hit them).
So your self driven car will almost certainly go its entire life without it either, so using it as an objection is pointless. You might as well be asking what the self driving car will do when a Man From Mars teleports onto the hood, because the answer is the same: that situation won’t come up. So stop obsessing on things that won’t happen. You are more likely to win the lottery than ever face a trolley decision, with you or your car driving. And you’re not going to win the lottery.
Good examples.
Though I have to say during an emergency while driving I would have no idea if D were true and probably not E, either. Depending on the terrain, I might not even be aware of whether there was a cliff. ( I once spun off the road due to a catastrophic brake failure. I ended up in the ditch. A few hundred yards further and there would have been no ditch, it would have been a long plummet. )
Ever wonder why it's far left companies that are pushing so hard to take away your "need" to drive? The same companies that want you living in 500 sq ft domiciles climate controlled by a centralized authority complete with environment friendly smart meters.
I.m talking about the navigation GPS system. All it would take is them putting erroneous Nav Coordinates into to GPS computer..
The Trolley Problem is a moral paradox presenting a moral dilemma. It hasn't been 'solved.' The "path you should take" is determined by human decision when confronted with an ethical dilemma.
Software doesn't "solve" the problem. It implements the solution its designers choose. It takes the decision out of the human's, in this case the driver's, hands.
Your answer does not remove ethics and value judgements from driving, it merely changes who determines them.
Which is a system that shouldn’t be exposed to the outside.
Motorcycles are a viable, profitable, and often times actually very expensive, section of the market. Self driving cars are looking to START with much higher market penetration.
Actually pretty much EVERY tech company, and most of the car companies are working on this. It ain’t politics, it’s tech. Tech that IS coming and WILL succeed in the marketplace.
The Trolley Problem is a decision tree. You decide what’s important, and decide accordingly, it’s a best case of a bad situation matrix. In practical reality, not the hokey artificiality of your theoretical, it very much is solved. Every chess program ever written has solved it. Every war game. It’s actually pretty easy: buy time.
There is NO ethical value judgement while driving. You do NOT run into any version of the Trolley Problem while driving. And even if you did you wouldn’t have any time to realize it until it was too late. Your average accident avoidance situation happens in a distance of 100 to 200 feet, at 40MPH you cover that distance in 2 to 4 seconds. By the time you think “should I hit the little old ladies or the baby” you’ve probably already run over whichever one you were pointing at. You DO NOT face trolley problems EVER. And pretending you do just to complain about coming technology is silly.
If you have one robo car in an all human driver environment then the feed back helps the robo car because intelligent beings are driving the other vehicles.
Nobody knows what will happen in an all robo car environment with CPU and software sending feed back to each other and to itself. Taking the "intelligence" out of the equation. My guess is grid lock.
>>>”buy time”
If only I could buy more time, I’d never have to solve any problem.
There are 27,000 accidents every day. Someone who says there are never any moral decisions involved is, I believe, perhaps naive - or has never had a dog run out in front of them.
:)
There aren’t. Most accidents involve no option, or at least no option between different things to hit. It’s simple factual reality. I’ve had dogs run out in front of, slammed on the brake. Been in accidents, ones I saw coming and ones I didn’t. I never had, and neither have you, the option between killing to different people and no ability to avoid it entirely. There’s a reason why the setup to the Trolley Problem involves so many odd ball circumstances, first it’s a trolley on tracks so you have limited mobility, no brakes, people are tied down, etc etc etc. Because in reality you have many many more option. Which is why I point out that on the off chance you wind up in a real world Trolley-ish problem the answer is ALWAYS the same: aim for the one furthest away, giving you more time to slow down, giving them more time to get out of the way, giving you less inertia to do less damage.
Buy time. It is the answer in reality.
I should point out that this part of your reply: “You decide what’s important” is a value judgement.
You decide what’s important in hypothetical never going to happen in reality sitting around over beers Trolley Problems. In reality when you’re traveling 58 feet per second and that dog ran out in the road 20 feet in front of you you don’t decide a damn thing. You react by instinct.
>>Most accidents involve no option
Many or most, sure.
>>”’Ive had dogs run out in front of, slammed on the brake..
What if that meant getting rear-ended? What if braking wouldn’t work and the choice was property damage? How much would be acceptable?
>>”Buy time. It is the answer in reality.”
You always choose the bad result furtherest away. It is quite possible that reduced inertia makes little difference in outcome to the target. Both targets could be quite close. You’ve merely made a value judgement -in effect - that the distance from you makes it of less value. It’s easy to imagine many cases where that would not be true.
I do understand the obvious point of maximizing options, giving oneself more time, decreasing velocity... all of these are excellent tactical approaches. It’s just not enough to cover every situation, will not always succeed in doing no harm. If they did, there would be no problem.
>>You react by instinct
We can make moral decisions by instinct. It could be said that these are of highest value in human beings.
Getting quite philosophical here, but this is a philosophical disccusion. I think different humans would have different “instinctual” reactions. And I believe we often judge a persons morality by those instincts.
I think you would agree with this. You may disagree that humans, unlike animals, can shape or change their instincts (as we can our habits.)
No time to for those decision. Dog is 20 feet out, will be hit in about 1/3 of a second. You jam on the brakes or you don’t. You don’t look in the mirrors, by the time you did you’d have hit the dog already.
There’s a reason why the first lesson of defensive driving classes is to look further down the road, and the second lesson is give yourself an escape path. They are both focused on the one thing that can actually make a difference in kind of potential accident: buy time. You see the problem sooner, have more time to react, and with an escape path you have avoided being in a Trolley. Because in the end the only value judgement that matters is AVOIDING the accident.
It’s not a philosophical discussion. It’s a practical discussion. The practical reason we want self driving cars is for them to be better drivers than us. Looking further down than we do, undistracted, not tired, not in a bad mood, making faster better decisions than us, doing a better job of never getting in a Trolley in the first place.
Say you know there is a car on your tail.. You're traveling 5 mph? 10? Say the dog is further out, too close to stop but you can swerve. Damage your car? Risk not breaking in time to go in a ditch? Lots and lots of possibilities other than '20 ft out, slam brakes or not.'
the only value judgement that matters is AVOIDING the accident.
Again, if there were always an option that resulted in no harm, or potential for harm, there would be no problem.
Notice you have to keep digging into the silly hypothetical territory. Thus proving my point. If a car is on your tail defensive driving teaches to change lanes, or worst case scenario get off the road and let them pass. Very low speed means you have plenty of time to stop. If the dog isn’t further enough out for you to stop then it’s still not further out enough for you to look around and start making value judgements on what you’d rather hit.
Part of defensive driving teaching is that if you’ve found yourself in a trolley you already screwed up. The vast majority of accidents wouldn’t happen if the drivers were looking further and keeping an escape path. So in the end there are always options, you just missed a bunch by driving wrong. Because reality isn’t like philosophical discussions.
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