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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, @09:34AM
Cars are equipped with many safety features for the persons in the car (with Mercedes being on the higher price range I expect them standard equipped with most of these). The thing is that there should not be a question of the driver or pedestrians being killed to preventing an accident, but if to kill pedestrians or not in case an accident would not cause harm to the driver (due to the safety measures inside the car).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @11:41AM
OK, so the car is driving along an alley at a speed of 100 km/h (at a road where this is allowed and reasonable). From behind a tree, a pedestrian suddenly enters the street. Breaking will not be sufficient to prevent hitting him. There are cars approaching on the other side of the road. The only available choices are: Steer into a tree (likely killing the driver, as at this speed the safety features don't help much), steer into the opposite traffic (obviously the worst option), or don't steer at all (likely killing the pedestrian).
That's a situation where the car can avoid the pedestrian, at the expense of the driver: Steer into a tree.