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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: 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.

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  • (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".