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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 31 2016, @06:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the explosions-killing-everybody-isn't-a-choice dept.

Researchers at MIT have put together a pictorial survey http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ -- if the self-driving car loses its brakes, should it go straight or turn? Various scenarios are presented with either occupants or pedestrians dying, and there are a variety of peds in the road from strollers to thieves, even pets.

This AC found that I quickly began to develop my own simplistic criteria and the decisions got easier the further I went in the survey.

While the survey is very much idealized, it may have just enough complexity to give some useful results?


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday October 31 2016, @06:50PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday October 31 2016, @06:50PM (#420976) Journal

    This AC found that I quickly began to develop my own simplistic criteria and the decisions got easier the further I went in the survey.

    These words make the blood run cold!

    In a world where heated debates over whether autonomous killer drones should have the ability to decide to target on their own, we come up with the most insidious solution: Let the AC decide! So we just install a Morality Anonymous Autonomous Coward (MAAC) alongside every AI, whether weaponized or not, and voila! Problem solved. With enough experience, the MAAC probably will not have to think at all!

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Monday October 31 2016, @06:56PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday October 31 2016, @06:56PM (#420979)

    The other solution is to let whoever is currently hanging on on /b/ make the decision for the machine.
    The wisdom of the internet will prevail.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday October 31 2016, @06:59PM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Monday October 31 2016, @06:59PM (#420982) Journal

      Can't wait for Halloween to be over so super_bob is not scaring us so badly!

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by JNCF on Monday October 31 2016, @09:22PM

        by JNCF (4317) on Monday October 31 2016, @09:22PM (#421051) Journal

        Hey aristarchus, Nate Silver [fivethirtyeight.com] currently gives Donald Trump a 24.4% chance of being the next President; that's basically the same probability as getting a critical failure on a d4! If you don't like the idea of /b/ running a car, just wait till you see direction they'd tip a country in. Happy Halloween!

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 31 2016, @07:11PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 31 2016, @07:11PM (#420988)

      And when you're putting people into the loop we're back to where we started, with human driven cars, except its NEETs from R9K earning dronebucks to buy their tendies instead of the inhabitants of the cars.

      I mean, its not like automation and outsourcing is creating vast populations of unemployables who need jobs that the economy is too small to provide, or anything.

      If you ever want one of those sleepless thoughts to keep you awake and worried in the middle of the night, note that some economic systems have done a pretty good job of balancing the employee to job ratio. Middle ages feudalism. 1950s - 1960s America. And there's been economic systems where the number of jobs has nothing to do with and often has been very small compared to the number of hungry employees. And those have all been some real paradises, like Germany before Hitler, urban poor in the French Revolution, USA before Trump... I'm just saying every economist and futurist saying that its great, just the best thing they ever heard, that half of us or three quarters or whatever are going to be unemployed due to robots or automation or WTF are I'm sure paid well for their treason today, but re-enacting the French Revolution complete with guillotines is not gonna be fun. And if its not gonna be fun I want to get it started early and get it over with, so we can start the rebuilding. So there's a substantial and growing segment of the population wishing they would just get on with it, so we can get it done with sooner.

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 31 2016, @07:22PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Monday October 31 2016, @07:22PM (#421003)

        > re-enacting the French Revolution complete with guillotines

        Here's a good way to put people back to work!
        There is a lot of money to be made in the high-end guillotine market, with plush leather bench, titanium blade, 22.2 sound, oxygen-free copper blood troth, friction-free maglev rails, high-speed 8K cameras...
        The Trump version comes plated with 24k gold, but I wouldn't vouch for its reliability.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 31 2016, @09:58PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 31 2016, @09:58PM (#421071)

          The apple one needs a new power cable every GD hardware revision. No IEC, no USB, no thunderturd, no hdmi no now we need usb-c...

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday October 31 2016, @07:43PM

        by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Monday October 31 2016, @07:43PM (#421021)

        Jobs are not the purpose of an economy.

        The purpose of an economy is to allocate our limited resources to server our needs and wants.

        Jobs are a means to an end. If jobs become obsolete, then so does our economy.

        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @08:10PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @08:10PM (#421032)

          And why should you decide how resources are allocated? Why should any of you unimportant idiots decide anything?

          Elong Musky wants to plant his seed on Mars. He could do it today if only the rest of you greedy insignificant fools would stop allocating resources to yourselves. Stop impeding Musky!

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by WillR on Monday October 31 2016, @08:34PM

          by WillR (2012) on Monday October 31 2016, @08:34PM (#421037)
          Aye, and one of those scarce resources is the first world lifestyle. Presently, we mostly allocate those to people who win the job game, by landing the highest paying position they can and occupying it as long as possible, as some sort of distant proxy for actual worth as a human (the correlation between the two was poor a hundred years ago, and probably inverted now, but I digress...)
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by dyingtolive on Monday October 31 2016, @07:15PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Monday October 31 2016, @07:15PM (#420993)

    I found that I prioritized the passengers whenever possible. When I couldn't do that, I prioritized the people who were crossing at the right time. When I couldn't do that, I went for the most lives saved.

    While the first might make me a bad person, I feel like that's (for better or worse) how most people would tend to drive already, so I feel like it gives the least regressive outcome to what is likely an impossible situation to solve. A large amount of it is generally rhetorical anyway, because I don't think a car could ever distinguish the difference between a doctor, criminal, or athlete simply walking down the road.

    Also, I'm waiting for the btards to flood this thing and poison it toward saving all the animals at any cost.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @08:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @08:51PM (#421044)

      > I prioritized the passengers whenever possible. When I couldn't do that, I prioritized the people who were crossing at the right time. When I couldn't do that, I went for the most lives saved.

      That is about what I wound up doing. I added one other rule, stay in my lane, don't swerve, unless it is really clear that swerving will save people (not pets).

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday November 01 2016, @05:39AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday November 01 2016, @05:39AM (#421145) Journal

      I may have skewed my results slightly. I assigned negative value to executives when deciding which option, but all the executives in my scenarios were male. (bit of a sexist assumption there, hey)

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
      • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday November 01 2016, @02:44PM

        by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday November 01 2016, @02:44PM (#421259)

        Oh yeah. I didn't even cover that part. Mine said that I had a bias for hitting men. Given the three rules I played by, I'd argue that they had a bias for putting men in the wrong lane.

        --
        Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:39AM (#421161)

      I found that I prioritized the passengers whenever possible.

      I found that I prioritized the fuckable women. Because I like fucking women. And more fuckable women means more fucking fuckable women.

      And while I may well get downmodded for this, that was, in fact, the strategy I used when taking the test.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @09:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @09:00PM (#421047)

    >> This AC found that I quickly began to develop my own simplistic criteria and the decisions got easier the further I went in the survey.

    > These words make the blood run cold!

    OP here. I'm glad that someone picked up on this. Trust the ancient to have some common sense!

    At the same time that I was developing simplistic criteria, I was also scaring the hell out of myself, realizing that others would likely do the same thing, including programmers...and simplify what is actually a tough problem (in many cases).