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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?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by moondrake on Wednesday October 12 2016, @09:27AM
I hope the article is not completely correct. If it is implemented, it is stupid, and Mercedes will be in trouble in many countries.
As mentioned above, in Germany for example, you are not allowed to weigh lives against each other in advance of the situation. In several other EU countries, the car driver is always accountable for damages of an accident with a pedestrian or cyclist, even without causing the accident.
But there is another problem here. The software is bound to make mistakes. As it cannot account for every situation. Every single case in which somebody gets killed that could have been avoided, especially when it is seen as unjust (3 children killed by an older guy who stole the car after a robbery, and later analysis showed that the accident could have been avoided by crashing the car in a haystack that was identified by the software as concrete) is going to cost mercedes a lot of money and a bad rep. Its seems far worse than an exploding phone to me....
I think with the current state of things, the correct thing would be to give control to the driver (which would be silly in the last second, so it has to be preconfigured shifting all accountability to the driver) or make no decision in software at all. In the latter case, the choice made by the car is completely random (or weighted depending on likelihoods of fatalities).
I would not wan to buy such a car but rather prefer to make this kind of choice on my own, and when it is time....