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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @10:15AM
So if such a Mercedes injures or kills one or more pedestrians, does the owner or the car company face attempted murder or manslaughter charges.
This is not informative, this is bullshit.
1. pedestrians do not have the right of walking in path of a car and expect it to be able to stop in impossible situations.
2. see #1
You see, the world of law is not "black and white" like you seem to believe.
Right of way means that cars cannot expect you to yield. That's all. What the program just needs to do is determine if it is possible to avoid a crash without causing injuries to occupants of the car *AND* additional injuries to outside pedestrians, whatevers. The simple and correct solution is to break and avoid crashing into things. If you cannot avoid crashing into things without crashing into bigger things, you just break.
If pedestrians step out in front of the car, right of way does not reduce their liability in causing that crash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:45PM
There's a difference between "break" and "brake". You might want to learn that difference, because your post doesn't say what you probably meant it to say.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:56PM
Yes, if you don't brake your car may break.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:29PM
They absolutely do have the right to do that. Just not all the time everywhere. If what you said were true, then vehicular manslaughter wouldn't be a thing in cases like that.
Also, the correct thing for the car to do is to kill the people in the vehicle if it assesses that the number that would be killed would be smaller. I'm a bit skeptical that the sensors are good enough to know how many people would be involved in the possibilities, but assuming the car can accurately sense the number of people, the correct thing to do would be to kill the occupants of the car to save the larger number of people.
This isn't a moral dilemma, it's something that's treated like a moral dilemma because the people who driver Mercedes are rich, but it's really not a moral dilemma. A moral dilemma would be if the car should pull into oncoming traffic killing 2 people in order to save a small number of pedestrians. That would at least be some sort of dilemma. But, again, the answer would be to pull into oncoming traffic in that scenario.