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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: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 13 2016, @03:31AM
Once a cop gave me a warning for jaywalking-- on a college campus, on a route I'd taken dozens of times. Was on sidewalks the whole time, which were obviously meant for pedestrians.
I was like, WTF? Okay, what happened? Something had to have happened for the cops to be scurrying around chasing down pedestrians. I didn't know I was on the only campus in the whole state of Texas that didn't give pedestrians right of way, and the previous week there'd been an incident in which a car struck a pedestrian. Well that exception to the norm didn't last long after that. About two weeks later, the university changed the rules to give pedestrians right of way everywhere on campus.
Anyway, why not move pedestrians above the streets? Put the whole dang sidewalk at about the level of the 3rd story of an average apartment. Make most of the buildings at least 3 stories tall, and connect their 3rd floors to the walkway. I know, I know, it would be very expensive. But nowhere near as much as we've already spent on automobile roads.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 13 2016, @01:34PM
Not a bad idea at all - in denseley populated areas. Wouldn't work well in most of Small Town America, but it makes sense in the big cities. No more waiting for a safe gap in traffic, no more conforming to crosswalk and green "walk" nonsense. Just connect all the buildings up in the air, and be done with it. Architecture would be a major pain, though. Every person who owns a building within the connected maze is going to raise some sort of objection. "Dude, it's the LAW! You've got to provide access to the walkway, it's just that simple! Now we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way, but you WILL eventually compromise with us!"