Should a car, generally prioritize the survival of its occupant or pedestrian? Not answering this is the same as answering it with 'surprise me'. And either answer is wrong.
I think it gets traction with self-driving cars because people, stupidly, expect computers to make perfect decisions 100% of the time. This idea runs into a logical inconsistency when presented with a scenario in which there is no perfect decision. Rather than confront the fact that it's unreasonable to expect perfect decisions 100% of the time, people try to come up with a way to declare a perfect decision in a no-win scenario.
I don't think it's that people expect perfect decisions.
You are right that it essentially never happens with humans. But why doesn't it happen with humans? I think it is because if we are driving down a highway at high enough speed for this issue to arise, we probably aren't going to be aware of what is in our swerve path, and even if we are we probably don't have the time to recognize that we have to make a choice, nor the processing power to make such a choice.
Hence, there isn't really any need to consider this issue with human drivers because humans cannot make a decision in such a situation.
Self-driving cars, on the other, should have the sensors and the attention and the processing power to take into account everything to the side of the road in addition to what is on the road. With them, unlike with human drivers, it is actually possible for them to make a decision in these situations.
I think it is getting traction simply because with self-driving cars, unlike with human driven cars, it is actually a meaningful question. It's meaningful even if you assume that computers don't make perfect decisions--they at least have the time and data to make a decision, unlike humans.
And if the purpose of autonomous vehicles, as is often stated, is to reduce the numbers of deaths (40,100 in 2017 in the US) and injuries related to such scenarios and vehicles, we have to have at least a tacit understanding of that which we are implicitly prioritizing, if nothing else. However, if the point is just to apply an ideology in the form of a technology, until everything in our lives is computerized, and considered in terms of computation, or if (as I've talked about before on here) it's about removing the need for God and Man to make the choice, then avoiding such questions is the very (inherently not so) explicit goal, as that we can neither admit to either wanting to create the black box nor that it is a black box.
The only way to truly not make the decision is to actually not make it, that is, for the motor vehicle to never be traveling in the first place.
In any case, you lost me when you got to "the driver has a potential for an increased chance of death." How exactly do you propose a computer will calculate this? Even today's best supercomputers would take multiple orders of magnitude longer to model the odds than it would require to act on them, and even then it would just be a guess. Hell, we judge car safety today by ramming them into objects repeatedly to see how they perform on average, and it still has only a vague relationship to what might happen to you in an actual collision.
My point is that it is 100% unfeasible for the computer to model these probabilities, and I see no reason to think it will ever be feasible. Even without getting into the weird things like "what if the pedestrian is 99 years old, or a 20 year old pregnant woman?" the complexities are basically infinite.
So the only correct answer I see is for the computer to do exactly what we would expect a competent driver to do today: stop the car as quickly as possible. And assuming it's not overdriving it's sensors (something humans are not supposed to do either) then that should work damn near 100% of the time.
I would agree.
But my point is that making the decision, and then trying to say we're not making a decision, is disingenuous. So the question becomes: disingenuous to what end? We are making statements about what is or isn't permissible. In the case of the standard human laws, we (generally) find it impermissible for someone in such a situation to save their own life by ending someone else's, in the same way that if A puts a gun to B's head and says shoot C or die, for B to shoot C would be regarded in most jurisdictions as murder, regardless of any part A plays in the scenario. And replicating these laws in machines is perfectly fine. They, like us, have no chance of fully understanding any of the consequences of anything either of us experience, so we can probably only operate in a pragmatic functional fashion. However, in building a machine that replicates what is permissible in this way, as already applied to humans, we must also admit that we are instantiating in hardware a set of rules to, in certain circumstances, kill and or injure people, one way or the other. But we're doing this for the purpose of, also, preventing such where impermissible (and perhaps, even, reducing such overall). Yet, it still remains that we must construct what will do that; we must enact in a very precalculated fashion a predefined, concrete expression of what is permissible, and therefore, what is not permissible. But we, and this is the whole reason, I will contend, at the heart of the argument, and why the debate is a contentious as it is, that is that we very much do not want to admit to the expression. And only by saying the question can't be answered, therefore, here's an answer, can we do that.
At some point it will have to be regulated.
The result of your choice, to brake or 'just stop' means there will be situations where passengers die to save real or theoretical pedestrians, as soon as this is established in the media the sales of these cars will plummet, and your decision will have repercussions increasing the number of human-accidents across the board.
> The car cannot calculate the probabilities
I think we may be talking about different things, probabilities are the foundation of self driving algorithms, there is never a 100% right place, just adjustments and corrections, calculations that lead to percentages that lead to choices. Maybe you are thinking about the older cruise control (like in some BMWs), they tried to anticipate things on the road and would brake faster than a human could, saved a few bumps, caused a few..
Think about how stupid it is to program trolley problem logic. It suggests you program the car to purposefully crash into something. We will be absolutely fine just trying not to crash.
That means the car is constantly thinking to itself (“should I give up and just choose what to hit instead?”). No thanks.
The most basic rule of driving is to adjust your distance & speed to the surroundings/conditions. You should always be able to come to a complete stop without hitting anything. Obviously we humans suck at taking everything into account, but would the same hold true for self driving cars?
These decisions seem unavoidable.
Not sure i'm so comfortable with this; it will result in a number of people killed who never accepted this risk and might have been safe. In order to save a number of people who accepted risk in the first place.