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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @08:42AM
* They generally travel at relatively low speeds
* They are driven exclusively by professional drivers
* Their sheer mass makes them nearly impervious to collisions with passenger vehicles
* Their ride height keeps their passengers out of the path of most vehicles that would hit them (although the new low-floor city buses reverse this trend in order to simplify boarding of disabled passengers)
* Passengers probably wouldn't use them anyway, and even the latest airbags are extremely dangerous to unbelted passengers
* Passengers, if thrown from their seat, will usually impact an adjacent seat rather than being ejected or hitting a hard or sharp surface
City buses and school buses almost never suffer passenger fatalities, especially in situations where safety devices would have helped. Over-the-road buses are most likely to kill passengers in rollover or loss of control accidents rather than due to collisions.
Beginning this year, new over-the-road buses are required to have seat belts in the US. However, existing buses are not required to be retrofitted.