Good examples.
What if the choices are:
A) Sideswipe another car off the road/cliff
B) sacrifice crash your own vehicle
C) attempt a driving maneuver that would avoid either A or B
- maneuver requires skill level A
- maneuver requires skill level B
- maneuver requires skill level C…
- maneuver not possible now due to weather conditions
- maneuver not possible due to driver mental alertness condition
D) Other car contains two killers fleeing a murder
E) Other contains a family of five
And on and on. My point is that even if you could quantify and program for all variable, which is impossible, driving still involves moral decisions and value judgements.
Humans make these, machines cannot. Machines can implement them, but not make them.
I don’t want Lord Google making them for me.
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. )