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

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: 4, Funny) by art guerrilla on Wednesday October 12 2016, @11:18AM

    by art guerrilla (3082) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @11:18AM (#413393)

    thanks for triggering my rant:
    drive to work on rural roads, one where it is 55 MPH and i am driving directly into the sunrise, and with the glare of the sun, the glare off the hood, the visor pulled down, i ALMOST hit two stupid kids walking TWO FEET inside the road edge (with NO paved bicycle lane/shoulder), where i didn't see them until i whizzed by at 55+, just *barely* missing the retards... of course, if i had hit them, it would have been 'my fault', even though they were so stupid they metaphysically deserved to be darwined... stupid shits, they couldn't shift two feet over OFF the fucking road until i went by because they would have gotten a grass seed on the cuff of their pants or something...
    and the ultimate cause: stupid city mice who don't know shit about living in the country and think schlepping down a rural highway is the same as their suburban cul-de-sac...
    same type of 'tards who stand 3-4' inside the road waiting for their bus on another 55MPH road, WHEN THERE IS A SIDEWALK RIGHT NEXT TO THEM... HOW STUPID can people (i don't care their age) be ? ? ? apparently, life-threateningly stupid...
    don't get me started on all the idiot parents who drive their precious stupid, fat, ugly snowflakes to the end of their rural lane, and wait for the stupid bus... STOP BABYING your stupid, fat, ugly monsters, NOBODY wants to kidnap those 'tards except their estranged parents... AND they get to the point where they not only DO NOT pull off to the SIDE of the road, but sit RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE, RIGHT AT THE STOP SIGN... then, another 'tard parent parks right next to them so they can chat about how stupid and fat and ugly their stupid, fat, ugly monsters are, NEARLY BLOCKING THE WHOLE INTERSECTION because they are too stupid, fat and ugly to realize or care how inconsiderate they are being so they can baby their stupid, fat, ugly 'tards...
    grrrrr...

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by rts008 on Wednesday October 12 2016, @11:36AM

    by rts008 (3001) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @11:36AM (#413395)

    Sounds like an ironclad case of you are driving too fast for conditions to me, not pedestrians, being the problem.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:14PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:14PM (#413540) Homepage

      And I'm sure the two boys, if they were struck and killed, would be thrilled to know that they were in the legal right.

      See, the problem with victim blame shaming is that, yes, it's not the victim's fault, but assuming that the victim didn't want to be victimized, they could have made some "common sense" choices to avoid becoming victims. Reality doesn't care if you think you should have the right to walk across a freeway or through a dark alley in an unsafe neighborhood, you are just fucking yourself over, and no amount of legal recompense will fix that; unless of course your goal was repayment, in which case blaming the victim feels rather justified.

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    • (Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday October 12 2016, @08:38PM

      by lgw (2836) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @08:38PM (#413629)

      The laws of physics don't care who is driving too fast for conditions. Look after your own ass when walking.

      Also, in the country, "driving too fast for conditions" is the cityboy way to say "driving".