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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: 1) by Francis on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:42PM
What duty? They have a responsibility to themselves to be on the look out for things like this because the court can't order them back to life or uninjured. But, there's no legal obligation for them to do that at the present. It just influences the charges that are brought and the ultimate amount of financial liability for the driver.
It's similar to drivers driving defensively, you do that out of self-interest, not because you have some sort of obligation to do it.
There are some situations like jaywalking where it might be legal to run them over, but even there, it's a really, really bad idea to do that if you can avoid it. Chances are that if you can see them a couple seconds ahead of time and don't at least try to stop, that you'll wind up in prison.