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Comment by eicnix | Hacker News Reader

In Germany those decision violate the first article of its Constitution: Human dignity is inviolable

I think those decisions are necessary are driverless cars but will start a huge discussion about the ethic behind calculation the minimum victim. This includes making decision if saving a child is more importing than saving a elderly.

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This is why I think vehicle autonomy will never happen the way we want it to.

Collectively, the death toll of driving will be significantly reduced, but it will only take a few people being killed by driverless vehicles for people to make a fit about it, because there is a clear victim.

In an accident, it's exactly that: an accident. It wasn't an intended decision, it just sort of happened. With AI and autonomous vehicles, everything is a decision, and someone gets the worse outcome, and every little bad thing that happens is going to cause an uproar.

I'm so sure that something similar has happened before, I'm struggling to come up with it though.

I do not know if this is real but in Hot Fuzz (there goes the credibility) the main protagonist insists that traffic accidents are actually collisions. The name accident implies that there is no culprit but I believe in vast majority of fatal crashes there is a faulty party.

Some older statistics I read claimed that (in UK I think) 30% of crashes were due to alcohol and another 30% to fatigue. In these cases for example there is a culprit and the crash was no accident. For me, accidents are cases when a mechanical part breaks or an oil spill makes the vehicle incontrollable. But people crashing into each other because of alcohol, fatigue, boredom, distraction or speed should be responsible for their acts and should not claim being in an accident.

>In an accident, it's exactly that: an accident. It wasn't an intended decision, it just sort of happened.

I think that one of the issues is that it's often not just an accident, not something that "just sort of happened". Safe driving practices do work. E.g. checking your blind spot, not running stop signs, always looking both ways before going when the light turns green, etc. Of course, you can only do so much to protect yourself against other people's bad driving. But there is a moral component to car accidents; they happen more often to bad drivers.

You're absolutely right. I 100% agree, and there's a single person at fault whom victims pursue. Who faces the blame whenever a driverless vehicle is forced to make a decision to strike a pedestrian or hit a wall rather than a head-on collision? Driverless cars do.

We may not like it but that's how the public will see it.

You can show that the car did its best, statistically, or at least no worse than a panel of drivers (jury). Black boxes have a long tradition and self driving and assisted driving cars should have one.

The answer really sometimes is "you are out of luck".

For a bug or a really bad known issue, authors and designers (car company) should be liable.

I'm pretty optimistic that the clear and vast befits of self-driving vehicles that benefit everyone from commuters to shipping companies will push over that "new and scary" hump.

Just look all the civil liberties and privacy that we have given up over the last 15 years in exchange for "safety" and being connected through social media and the internet in general.

If you would have told someone 20 years that we were going to start making teachers wear body cameras to record every word and movement of everyone they interact with, they would thought you were crazy, yet here we are.

I want those two hours of my day back, to use upon my laptop- if that means i have to gamble death with a better loaded dice, im in

Most accidents are also decisions. They just often involve unconscious ones, or ones made in a split-second without thinking (e.g. "do I swerve this way or that way?"). Humans aren't that good at doing detailed cost-benefit analyses during split-second decisions, and so we call the results "accidents", but all that really means is the human wasn't skilled enough/fast enough to prevent the problem, whereas a computer in many cases will be. If a driverless car is forced into a situation where it has to have a potentially-fatal collision with someone, a human in the same situation would have the same problem.

So really, the only question comes down to, what's the ethical approach to deciding how an AI should prioritize human life? If a driverless car is forced into a situation where it must kill one of several people, who dies? (in practice that probably comes down to figuring out which action is the least likely to result in a fatality, even if all actions are extremely likely to result in one they're not going to have identical probabilities) And perhaps more interestingly, if the car has to decide between probably killing its driver, and probably killing someone else, which way does it decide? (though again, this probably comes down to which person is more likely to survive the accident, and that's probably going to be the driver because they're protected by multiple safety systems whereas someone walking along the road is not)

Brakes. It should use the brakes.

This isn't about the trolley problem (it's like Godwin's Law for autonomous vehicles, I guess), it's about the fact that we already routinely license drivers that end up injuring and killing people and are making no particular effort to improve that process, yet act like autonomous vehicles aren't acceptable until they're orders of magnitude better.

I find it so hilarious that these threads always seem to degenerate into moral discussions about some fantasy world where driverless cars have to understand the meaning of everything in the world in order to make judgement calls about the worth of different human lives.

Literally all a driverless car has to do is hit the brakes if it's going to hit an obstacle. There's no moral decisions, no discussions about who deserves to live and who should die. Just use the brakes.

I just wrote the code. And it's open source so any car company is free to use it. Here it is:

if (obstacle) then { brakes = true }.

You're welcome.

Every person about to be involved in a traffic accident needs to make that decision, and the decision each individual makes can vary wildly. Maybe to hurt the least amount of feelings the car should just do a coin flip when its only choices are hitting 2 people.

There is sometimes a way to indeed reduce an impact of a crash. Coin flip is not really the only thing acceptable as human drivers usually act selfish. Therefore such a strategy should be acceptable. As would a strategy based on statistics.

The only important part is that the driver is informed how the car may react in terms of the strategy and that the decisions of the driving system are recorded.

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