SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] 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 [caranddriver.com] while making passing reference to ongoing research, investigations, or discussions.

But not Mercedes-Benz [caranddriver.com]. Not anymore.

The world’s oldest carmaker no longer sees the problem, similar to the question from 1967 known as the Trolley Problem [theatlantic.com], 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 [caranddriver.com]. Every time.

Is it really a decision based on morality, or because choosing to save the pedestrians is much harder to code?

Original Submission