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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: 2) by Entropy on Wednesday October 12 2016, @08:50PM
There are clearly some "pedestrian zones", for lack of a better word. Areas where pedestrians are the primary, and cars need to yield no matter what. Some examples include crosswalks, sidewalks, probably parking lots, and such. Large cities function differently from the rest of the world, of course. In NYC being a pedestrian is a totally different thing than somewhere like Idaho.
In my opinion a rural or suburban school zone doesn't qualify because most schools are on their own roads nowadays, but they still infect the nearest actual road with a school zone completely annihilating traffic. Does this mean pedestrians should be able to violate pedestrian laws and cross at random points/odd angles/lay in the street? No. It means we should go slower to try to increase safety but not immunize idiocy. If someone is 12 and thinks sitting in the street is OK the world is probably better off if they are waffled.
In most areas(not large cities) we are no longer a pedestrian society. Except for areas designated for pedestrians cars need to have right of way. If someone wants to risk crossing a highway in dark clothes at night good luck to them, but if they are waffled it's on them.