The Amorality of Self-Driving Cars
nplusonemag.com
nplusonemag.com
Of course, this is rather less of an issue that it seems, since the article itself points out that other, more normal safety features are being included that lower the risk from accidental collisions and the cars might not be going fast enough for this sort of issue to be a concern in most instances (read, those not involving a motorway or autobahn). And in those cases, well, anyone who might be in the path of such a car in such a situation might be best classed as 'too dumb to live', since high speed roads are not good places for pedestrian crossings or playing chicken.
But in the 0.00001% of cases which this issue might be a thing, then they should honestly just value the driver and passengers. Like every other tool and item in human society,for good or bad alike.
Only for games with multiple iterations.
In addition, "Me first" strategies often create something fairly close to optimal for a lot of cases--we call them "greedy" algorithms for a reason.
However, if the person would only be injured, it should prefer that to someone else's death (as the person himself would be legally obligated to do.)
Such a car would not drive so close to a truck that it could not simply stop should the truck lose its cargo. It would not approach a tunnel at a rate of speed where it could not brake to avoid an obstruction. People do that because they ignore risk in favor of some perceived time advantage, but robots don't.
If we imagine the sets of circumstances that require a life and death decision to occur while driving safely, suddenly the number becomes vanishingly small. Things like "an earthquake occurs and the bridge you are on loses a section." or "a power transformer explodes and drops a power line across the road", or "a plane crashes into the ground in front of you." Under these extreme situations how the human in control would perform is practically a random number function. That a robot would minimize the loss of life, seems like the "correct" choice regardless.
Then again, given some of the stuff there's a market for, I guess there is the worry that 'driverless car aimed at person who wants to be in James Bond/Bullitt/whatever' might turn out to be a selling point for some manufacturers with questionable ethics.
As cars go autonomous, they'll communicate faster, drive more predictably, and generally be safer. At some point - 1%, 5%, 20%? - the network as a whole will benefit with less accidents and less of the resulting delays which means human drivers will be less likely to be late which takes away anxiety and potential distractions, making it even safer.
Therefore, I think these "Do I kill A or B?" scenarios become less frequent over time.
I just hope that "over time" part happens quickly... or the first "bad" choice by an autonomous car will delay the industry by years.
What I'm saying is that there are diminishing returns on eliminating all accidents, unless you are continuously elevating someone's life to an infinite value (your own, for example).
Is our expectation at some point that ZERO people of INFINITE value die shuttling themselves physically around this planet every a year? I'd be willing to accept a small chance of death (by contract even) if I always got to my appointments on time. Think of it as a fancy donor card.
People sometimes need the back sides of lane markers to be red to show there driving in the wrong direction at highway speeds. That's the kind of safety issues self driving cars need to address. Highly convoluted but what if a clown and a child jump off an overpass style crap completely misses the point. Self driving cars could chose to randomly kill someone randomly once per 1,000 years on the road and still end up safer than people.
As to cars the major upside is they are all one on one collisions. And insurance companies are really good at handling that already. There are even laws limiting how much pedestrians for example can sue for if they are struck in some areas.
Particularly when this "getting ahead" behavior results in accidents that require road closures that back up highways for hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
IMHO, safety will win. Human life is much more valuable than wasted time. 50km/h is consider as safe speed for human driver in city. Computers are faster, so 60-70km/h will be safe for them.
A 30 kph collision with a pedestrian is almost always survivable. Anything faster isn't.
Robots can react faster, but cars still take time to stop. Most streets don't have more than a couple of feet of distance between moving traffic and parked cars. Reaction time is meaningless there.
Robots can use also other things to improve safety, which cannot be used by human driver because (s)he is busy with driving, e.g. "laser" pointers of car direction of drive at road, like "mark my lane" light used by bicyclist; or directed audio/video/vibration alarms to warn of potential crash; or safety hands at front of car (like human hands), which will be released by computer to pickup child right before hit, or to to take hit from larger distance, slowly, or to change direction of car, or remove something from the road.
Humans cannot do that but robots can.
Do people really want to lose their remaining time with their family just to spend it commuting and doing the same stuff they could be at doing at home in the car? How about losing their sleep in the morning because their car takes longer to get them to work than it used to?
Some people might want to roll straight out of bed and into their offices/workplace. A lot of others would rather minimise the time spent going to/leaving work and spend it in their own home doing stuff they want to be doing.
This does come with quite a few caveats in regards to road surveillance and infrastructure and legal turnabout, but it makes a lot more sense than trying to merge the two completely different styles of driving. Essentially that is the problem that will cause accidents; pretty much everyone who drive should know that traffic patterns that deviate from what is expected and currently existing on the road are common causes for accidents. Trying to merge two completely separate types of driving just seems like a fools errand, though I do understand that the alternative would probably be a bit too much for the current public and governments.
Ultimately though, I think that while the ethical concerns are real, they become greatly diminished along with the natural evolution of where autonomous cars take city infrastructure.
You run into a cascade problem if your car decides to weigh the fates of other cars by trying to run some value comparison. Who sets the values? Can they be spoofed, and so on.
So first rule is that it cannot harm another vehicle to save itself. You aren't really part of the equation here, you cannot be. By the act of using the autonomous automobile you and it become one for sake of the how the rules play out.
It seems that, as driverless cars become more common, you are more frequently on the other side of the equation.
But I think the ethical dilemma will end up solving itself over time, as well. When a car has to make an emergency decision, it will make a 5-10 millisecond call to its attorney, Dr. Watson, Esq., who will review all case history and settlements, run background checks on the potential victims, weigh all the factors against the current political climate, and direct the car to choose the accident with the lowest expected liability.
Driverless cars will result in a MASSIVE reduction in deaths of drivers and passengers, a MASSIVE reduction in harm to human pedestrians and non-drivers and to the environment.
Driverless cars do not look at their cell phones. Driverless cars do not drive drunk. Driverless cars are not in a hurry, not distracted, not upset by what their boss just said, or by the kids in the back seat. Driverless cars will not err as humans do. Driverless cars will reduce the incidence of "trolley problems" incurred in practice by 2 orders of magnitude or more.
Driverless TRUCKS will allow cargo to travel at night, when humans are less likely to be on the road. Which will reduce congestion, which will allow people to get where they're going on time when they ARE on the road. Driverless trucks will KNOW when a car is behind them; there is no "blind spot", ever. And driverless trucks will signal to the car behind them, "you are too close, back off". And it will happen, and no one will get upset about it.
Driverless cars will not accelerate pointlessly from a stoplight, only to slam on the brakes a second later, because they did not see the line of traffic ahead. Driverless cars will not engage in petty competition with other driverless cars. Driverless cars will be like Buddhist drivers - steady as she goes, no stress, no drama. That means less fuel consumption, less road wear, less environmental damage.
Driverless cars will also give mobility to those who are unable to drive - people with eyesight challenges or physical coordination challenges.
Anyone fretting about the ethics of driverless cars along the lines of this article is completely, utterly, radically missing the forest for the trees.
Driverless cars will be a huge boon for modern society.
(Don't get me started about the idiocy of the statement that "car sales are engineered to bring safety features to the expensive models". Has this author completely missed the lessons of capitalism? )
There is almost zero percent likelihood that the scenarios presented in this article would happen (as pointed out everywhere here). But just for shits and grins, it doesn't matter what decision is made at the macro level. Because while n people may die in a very unlikely scenario, where n is the maximum possible deaths in that scenario, the total number of lives saved in that same moment by driverless cars renders all moral questioning moot.
Edit: to boot, driverless cars aren't amoral. The decision tree in these unlikely scenarios have already been programmed in by humans. It's their morality that you find yourself governed by.
The urban drivers pay tax revenue, which then "subsidizes" rural highways, which then produce... incredibly cheap food. Which is then consumed in... cities.
You could stop paying for highways, and then food gets more expensive, and it all evens out. And maybe that would make more sense. But don't trick yourself into thinking the relationship is parasitic.
Yes, I know, I know, suburban sprawl, rural communities, etc. But rather than perpetuating car-centric design and the inevitable, though fewer, deaths, maybe we should concentrate on designing walkable, bikeable, liveable cities instead.
I quit driving about fifteen years ago, primarily get around on bicycle with the occasional train or Uber. You really need to get locked out of a car for a while to appreciate the weird sense of entitlement that drivers get.
When the streets are full of cars and traffic is slow, well that’s just a fact of life, you mutter and deal with it. But if a bicycle is a driver’s commute by a few seconds, that’s license to go completely bananas. Somehow just the fact that someone owns a car makes them feel like their time is worth more than that of others, that society owes them a speedy drive, convenience, and free parking anywhere.
When people are regularly encased in hermetically sealed wheeled bubbled, they turn into sociopaths.
Unfortunately, when I walk on sidewalks I often feel threatened by the cyclists. They ride too fast, too close to people. They feel entitled and reckless because they have wheels and us only legs to walk. Cyclists sharing a sidewalk are just as bad, or worse compared to drivers sharing a road with cyclists.
The solution would be dedicated cycling paths, but those are a rarity in my city and many of those that exist are just one meter width marked right on the sidewalk, reducing the space for walking. Sometimes the sidewalk is too narrow and people have to enter the cycling path in order to pass, and that's where a self entitled cyclist would run over you just to teach you not to step on his path. That's why I often walk with some anxiety, you never know who's on wheels and what they think they are entitled to do.
I'm nervous cycling my bicycle around London, surrounded by entitled drivers who complain about cyclists at every opportunity but who don't see the problem with texting while driving at speed?
The solution would be to completely rid of cars in cities, and to only allow those who are physically disabled, or those who are highly trained to drive. How long is your commute? 10 miles? that's a 30 minute cycle journey each way (I did that before a hit and run road rage driver stopped me from cycling).
w/r/t the notion that cyclists sharing a sidewalk with pedestrians (a practice I would never condone) is "just as bad" as drivers sharing the road with cyclists, that's just stupid. A two ton machine can kill people. Pedestrians being killed by cyclists is nearly unheard of. It happened once in Central Park last year and the event was so extraordinary that bicycle blogs were talking about it for weeks.
At which point we then have to let the court system decide how a driverless car should act in the case of this problem. And then it gets even more complicated, since different countries and states (and even towns) might come to different conclusions here. Does your car now need to know how to act in every possible US state and country in the world in case it's taken there and gets into an accident?
More likely that naught, there will be federal regulations the US as to how the cars must behave, and states can elect whether or not to simply allow the cars, much like how there are national emissions standards.
Not only that but driverless cars will disrupt government revenue streams, the workforce, law enforcement etc. every industry will be affected and I don't think people are just going to welcome these changes with open arms.
Sure the tech news is gushing with praise, which fuels publicity for these big companies, but in the real world that media will turn on you in an instant when an incident occurs. There will be a large, active, hostile contingent of the public who depend on their jobs driving to feed their families and they wont just sit by and let their jobs become redundant. This isnt Uber, not by a long shot, this is massive global disruption.
Like any tech venture, it needs to scale successfully to gain world wide dominance. Prove that it works in a particular environment and expand. Sure companies will love the cost savings that come from driveless tech, but the general public, wow that will be a fight.
People will complain. Laws will be passed in backward places. Truckers will protest. Boom, gone.
If someone is walking around on the road, then they are putting themselves in an extremely dangerous position. Whether or not they deserve or intend it, they are the ones with the responsibility to not be there. It's unfortunate if they die, but it's their "fault", at least more than the passenger's fault. If a bunch of kid runs down a highway into incoming traffic, are all the cars supposed to kill themselves?
Sure, people will accidentally be stuck in the middle of a road. If you're unlucky enough to be in that situation, that sucks, but you can't ask someone else to die for it. Accidents are a part of reality, we should minimize unfairness rather than minimize loss of utility.
One person getting unlucky and dying is bad, but one person dying because someone else got unlucky is worse, in my opinion. That's twice the unfairness.
No it's not. I doubt that has ever come up with a human driver and probably won't with autonomous drivers either. If it does both humans or robots will probably think oh shit, hit the brakes and hope for the best.
double getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead){
return speedAtWhichStoppingDistanceIs (clear_road_ahead/3);
}
enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead));
try {
enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead));
}
catch (CatastrophicBrakeFailureException ex) {
// ???
}If there is a catastrophic brake failure currently, with human drivers, it isn't seen as a deep philosophical issue. I have absolutely no clue why this changes because the car is operated differently.
For the vast, vast majority of catastrophic failures, the basic procedure of pulling over and stopping the car will be absolutely fine.
The engine turned off can be used very effectively as a brake.
Humans end up calling randomPanic() at some point, so maybe that's what the vehicle should do to avoid accusations that it "intentionally" harmed one party or another.
When in doubt, follow the 3 laws for robots
First generation of the self driving vehicle should focus on safe driving in comparison to typical human drivers.
Like we have carpool/hov+ lanes we will start having autonomous lanes
I expect cargo trucks would switch to autonomous due mundane nature of the work and long driving hours
Asimov's 3 Laws were a plot device, not a serious attempt to codify ethics. They were designed to fail for dramatic effect, and his stories were about them failing constantly, because they presented the apparent paradox of a perfectly rational being appearing to behave irrationally.
The only law Asimov's robots actually adhere to is the Law of Unintended Consequences - and I believe this is the actual lesson for autonomous car engineers. The more powerful an AI is, and the more complex it is, and the more likely it is to fail in ways that can't be predicted.