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

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:46PM (#413608)

    Anywhere else is jaywalking, illegal, they have no right of way.

    WRONG! You vehicularly murderous person, you! Pedestrians always have the right of way, even when they are jaywalkiing, because they are soft and smooshy, while most vehicles are not.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:58PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:58PM (#413612) Journal

    But you know, even though sail has right of way over steam, a liner can't avoid a sailboat.

    There's "right of way" and then there's sense. You don't walk in front of a truck&trailer that's moving. It can't reasonably stop.

    This whole area is just full of edge cases, so I agree with the summary, they probably did it to make implementation simpler.

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    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.