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Comment by spurgu | Hacker News Reader

This aspect of autonomous vehicles is very boring compared to the ethical dilemma.

Should self-driving cars perhaps have a morality setting, with a range from "Screw everyone else" to "Save as many lives as possible (prioritize younger), don't worry about me at all"? And should this in turn be connected to your insurance policy (the more selfish the setting, the more you pay)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem#Implications_f...

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The trolley problem is much ado about nothing. Or nerd-sniping for ethicists. The vehicle could be set to maximize harm in case of an accident and still perform better than the average human driver by creating fewer accidents in the first place.

So if you want to optimize for human lives then don't worry about the trolley problem, instead consider how you can get sufficiently good autopilots into as many hands as possible as soon as possible.

Nearly every fatal collision could have been avoided by driving more slowly. Human drivers aren't blamed unless their speeds are notably excessive, but a computer system that basically is just turning a knob could always have just taken a bit more time and saved that life. If any "screw everybody" settings arise, the lawsuits will eliminate them soon enough.

This shouldn't be that difficult from legal perspective. Since you don't have the authority to kill someone, you can't choose who to kill.

Any action other than avoiding collateral altogether might be punishable.

As a side-note, nobody is going to buy a car that prefers to kill it's owner

What if that setting were tied to your risk threshold? Eg, you could set the car to drive very conservatively (respect speed limits, slow in dangerous conditions or areas) and it would prioritize your safety over all else, or to be a bit more reckless, but prioritize your safety less. That way you're making an explicit choice that you accept the personal risk in order to get to your destination faster, but you can't offload that risk on other people.

I think reckless driving options would do poorly, offering the option to casually go over the speedlimit would be quite a burden on the manufacturer.

There also aren't many situations where your safety isn't tied to others around you

How often do you expect trolley problems to actually arise?

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/trolley-5

Every time the car in front of you makes an emergency brake and you have to decide whether to rear end the car in front of you or risk the truck following you to rear end you.

In years of human driving this has literally never come up.

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