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Self-Driving Mercedes Will Prioritize Occupant Safety Over Pedestrians

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-more-heroes dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

The technology is new, but the moral conundrum isn't: A self-driving car identifies a group of children running into the road. There is no time to stop. To swerve around them would drive the car into a speeding truck on one side or over a cliff on the other, bringing certain death to anybody inside.

To anyone pushing for a future for autonomous cars, this question has become the elephant in the room, argued over incessantly by lawyers, regulators, and ethicists; it has even been at the center of a human study by Science. Happy to have their names kept in the background of the life-or-death drama, most carmakers have let Google take the lead while making passing reference to ongoing research, investigations, or discussions.

But not Mercedes-Benz. Not anymore.

The world's oldest car maker no longer sees the problem, similar to the question from 1967 known as the Trolley Problem, as unanswerable. Rather than tying itself into moral and ethical knots in a crisis, Mercedes-Benz simply intends to program its self-driving cars to save the people inside the car. Every time.

Is it really a decision based on morality, or because choosing to save the pedestrians is much harder to code?

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:57AM (#413294)

    If the car is waiting for children at a school crossing, and it detects an imminent rear-impact collision by a truck? It'll break the road rules and mow the children down. Save one life, anyway (who just happens to be a Mercedes customer)?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:02AM (#413296)

    Net worth of children: zero. It's their own fault for not growing faster.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @05:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @05:49PM (#413997)

      Are the children potential Mercedes customers?

      I thought not.

  • (Score: 2) by Some call me Tim on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:14AM

    by Some call me Tim (5819) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:14AM (#413304)

    If that's the case, they're doing it wrong. If they are waiting for kids to pick up, they should be parked in a proper parking/pickup zone.

    --
    Questioning science is how you do science!

  • (Score: 2) by Jesus_666 on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:29PM

    by Jesus_666 (3044) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:29PM (#413576)
    I think that if the truck is moving fast enough to kill the car's driver upon rear impact and close enough that an impact at such a speed is inevitable the car doesn't have enough time to accelerate away anyway. Also, the truck would just shove the car into the school children. Let's face it: The kids in your scenario will die no matter what the car does.