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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: 2) by quintessence on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:09AM

    by quintessence (6227) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:09AM (#413326)

    It would probably be easier just to code for the majority of the laws and let the fickle finger of fate take it from there (at least regardless of circumstances, the law is on your side).

    While it is still probable to bias the system slightly even under those confines, announcing it like MB is just setting the stage for endless litigation even when the system is not at fault.

    Not to mention a vehicle has crumple zones, multiple air bags and a ridgid frame to protect the occupants. Pedestrians do not. And those systems can be made more effective if the entire vehicle design is changed since minimal driver input is needed (indeed, you can start with a robust cage that seats five, and build the rest of the car around that).

    The trolley problem is a bad exercise in framing. Never is the moral implications of the designers of the trolley system in question, the company that didn't have adequate lockout or warning procedures, or the fact that a switch that could cause some severe mischief is so easily accessible. Nope.

    Yet it is upon you to make an instantaneous decision about a circumstance you had no hand in creating, and let everyone second-guess what you ought have done.

    Fuck that world.

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