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Self-Driving Mercedes Will Prioritize Occupant Safety Over Pedestrians

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:43AM   
from the no-more-heroes dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:kill the poor people (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:53PM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:53PM (#413412) Homepage

  My g/f and I are almost certainly in the top decile financially in the country where we live. Howevr, we walk everywhere that's within a kilometer or two. Neither of us own a car. Neither of us even has a driving license, as public transport everywhere we've lived has always been quick, cheap, and easy. (The only exception being her youth, which was on the other side of the pond, where it sucked.)

  --
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