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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: 3, Insightful) by Jesus_666 on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:52PM
This is about a situation where someone is guaranteed to die: If your car goes straight, even with braking, the children who spontaneously ran up a cliff (yes, seriously) die because you ram them at a high speed. If your car swerves to the one side you and all passengers will die because you have a frontal collision with a truck at a high speed. Most likely your car and/or the truck will be flung around and the magical children will also die because they're right next to a high speed car accident. If your car swerves to the other side you and all passengers will die because the car just went down a sufficiently steep cliff to ensure your death. The majority of humans wouldn't swerve because of moral considerations, they'd spend a second being shocked and then do something.
It's a contrived scenario designed to take a moral dilemma to its logical conclusion: The system absolutely has to kill someone; who does it choose and why? MB decided that in a situation where there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to keep everyone alive (and thus someone's life must be priorized over everyone else's) the car will priorize the lives of the occupants. That's a pragmatic approach because an ethically pure approach would require them to first solve some rather old ethical dilemmas that may be unsolvable.
For instance the one with the train tracks: One track has five people tied to it, the other has one. You get to decide which one a train goes down but you can't stop the train. Which is the correct choice? Many people will argue that since it's immoral to assign a value to a human life it's immoral to kill one to save five as their values are incomparable. The car will have to make such a choice, however, if it is programmed to save as many lives as possible.
MB sidestepped the whole thing by trying to save everyone involved in a dangerous situation but priorize the occupants if that isn't possible. Firstly, that's much easier than calculating which possible outcome will most likely kill the fewest people within a few milliseconds of reaction time. You swerve and brake if reasonably safely possible, otherwise you just brake. Secondly, i's probably better for their image than selling cars that are programmed to kill their occupants in order to potentially save more lives. Since there is no ethically pure way of solving the problem they just went with one that was useful by other metrics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:44PM
Your first sentence is wrong. You never want to swerve AND brake simultaneously. Because of the way friction works, you want to do one or the other to maximize the amount of useful force and to ensure you don't exceed the friction circle (friction ellipse, among other names. Not usually elliptical or circular).
That said, if you do decide to swerve, let go of the accelerator to maximize your control on the swerve.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:47AM
The idea of such a scenario is already in the realm of ridiculous, it is near impossible to guarantee that any given situation would be certain death. I think it is reasonable to program vehicles to swerve, but also avoid running straight into a wall at high speed, or the front end of a bus. So vehicle swerves to miss pedestrian, then swerves back to avoid a direct collision. This isn't a philosophical debate where you get to set up a situation with only two outcomes, such debates are as useful as Schrodinger's cat-box and better left to the university pub.
My main point is that the fancy Benz has a lot of extra protective measures, and the passengers stand a better chance of a head on collision with a bus than the pedestrian has with the front bumper. Further questions for MB to answer, will the car avoid any collision? Or can it sideswipe a vehicle? As you said, the calculations would take reaction time away. I stand by the idea that the car should do its best to avoid a collision, then do its best with the next scenario of impacting the other lane of traffic.
~Tilting at windmills~