I just threw away all my notes from college about the trolley problem and now it's apparently relevant.
Didn't we do this a few months back? In this thread
That thread ended in a crude masturbation joke. So I can't really distinguish it from the others.
Didn't I reference that thread in the OP?
I find that I am really not up for my driverless car being allowed to kill me. I guess I'm just an asshole.
More questions:
Will most people support programming cars with a utilitarian solution to the trolley problem? Yes.
Will this further the establishment of consequentialism as the globally accepted approach to morality? Yes.
Obviously, all cars will have a transponder that communicates the occupants of the cars to other cars and each car will be programed by the owner as to the amount of moral value they attach to various lives. And my car's transponder will be hacked to say that I'm riding with 400 orphan babies and a guy who can cure cancer with his mind.
What do you mean by "drones"?
Bingo Little, Pongo Twistleton, Barmy Fotheringhay-Phipps. People like that.
5: to me it feels like such a ludicrously unlikely scenario that it doesn't seem creepy. Plus, the added benefit of other people's cars killing them to save me.
Although the actual scenario described in the link seems just fine to me. It's not like driving into opposing traffic actually sounds like a good idea or likely not to get me killed. The idea that the car is supposed to take care of you within the boundaries of following the rules of the road doesn't bother me a bit -- where it gets yucky for me is if you extend it to more subtle (and less likely) scenarios where the car does something super self-sacrificing. Please don't immediately drive me off a cliff when someone with more people in the car swerves into my lane.
8.last - that guy's a asshole, keeping it a secret like that.
So is it acceptable for your car to nudge a fat man off of a bridge into the path of a runaway train et cetera et cetera?
The example seems rather forced - isn't death a more likely outcome of driving off a cliff than of swerving into traffic? I would hope the cars would pick injuries for several (maybe even with a chance of death) over certain death for one. And in better examples who dies would usually be rather hard to foresee - perhaps the cars could make decisions based on other criteria like reducing impact force.
Still, I'm not that bothered since random schmucks already make these decisions, and driverless cars would prevent many more deaths.
I think all cars should be outfitted with a device the shoots the driver in the face if it detects that they are texting while driving. I've seen way too much of it lately, including one cop. So yes, your car ought to be able to kill you.
13: He doesn't know yet. He's spending too much time sitting in traffic to have discovered his talents.
Clearly this will encourage carpooling.
In the event that people ARE bothered by their cars being willing to kill them, we probably wouldn't lose that much value by making them not solve the trolley problem in a utilitarian way given how rare real-life trolley problems are. Any sacrifices we make on that front to get self-driving cars adopted faster is likely worth it.
The linked article is stupid because it posits things like "what if it's a choice between driving into a school bus, or plowing into a tree?"
If my robot car drives into a tree at 40 mph, it might kill me. If it drives into a school bus coming the other way at 40 mph, it will _definitely_ kill me. Unless American school buses are made of Boing! the Miracle Plastic or something (in order to contain the evil children inside), they are every bit as robust and unyielding as trees and just as likely to kill you when you drive into one.
Whatever decision ends up getting made, the process of testing and debugging the "who-you-gonna-kill" software should be interesting.
I'd like some kind of car-type heuristic to be applied, too. So, anyone driving an SUV, first to be dead.
I'd prefer to see driverless cars prioritize not hitting pedestrians since a car-car collision is likely to cause less damage to everyone involved even at fairly significant closing speeds thanks to seatbelts and airbags. Also in driverless car utopia there's no guarantee that the oncoming vehicle is even occupied.
Presumably the end game for driverless cars involves the vehicles communicating with each other to collaboratively avoid accidents. That seems to me to require some standardized set of protocols so that different manufacturers don't have standards which interact to promote rather than avoid accidents.
9: Swarming Round Young Bingo
No Wedding Bells For Omar
The Chap in the Loop
Jeeves and the Unblinking Eye
The ROE of the Woosters
Radio for Jeeves
I don't think this is that likely to be much of an issue - driverless cars will have to be designed primarily to protect the passengers inside them, not engage in complicated trolley problems. To the extent that there are traffic management problems, that's a different issue, but there's just no way you're going to have individual robot cars making a utilitarian trade off to self destruct to save other cars. We don't (and shouldnt) expect that of human drivers so why would we ever expect that of robots.
Also, and I'm not kidding about this, Google is taking my keys out of my cold dead hands and not before. Maybe -- maybe -- I'd accept some kind of automated traffic management system for freeways where you go into auto-drive mode in a high traffic area. But otherwise no fucking way do I give up control of the car.
22 and 23 suggest that driverless cars should, ceteris paribus, always aim to collide with the most expensive vehicle around, since it will have the best safety precautions.
I think Stephen King addressed this issue already.
Short version: it never ends well with driverless cars.
That seems to me to require some standardized set of protocols so that different manufacturers don't have standards which interact to promote rather than avoid accidents.
Hippie.
He gazed up at the dashboard. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark LED screen. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Auto-Driver.
Why can't people just move into cities and use public transport?
It would be too far from my job.
26 is insightful. I endorse this approach.
I find it hard to get worked up about ostensible dilemmas like this because by the time driverless cars are sophisticated enough to be able to make proper moral judgments (even hardcoded ones) rather than just braking/swerving to avoid collisions, we'll all be hiding from the hunter killers in a nuclear wasteland anyway.
I was thinking the other day about how people move to the suburbs because they are considered safer than cities. But, with all that car dependency, suburbs are fricken' dangerous! I grew up in the suburbs, but I'd be scared as shit to raise my kid there, especially when they reach driving age. Better to stick to cities, where its safe.
34: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Hawaii is starting kindergarten this fall, and I was thinking about how perfectly competent she'd be to walk on her own to a neighborhood school, if that were an option. (Ie, 1) provided there was a minor stream of other kids also walking to school to normalize it, as we've discussed here before, and 2) our walkable elementary school was shut down for being shitty, so we're bussed over to the middle-class elementary school, which is definitely not walkable.)
I dunno, I think the main aspect that people seem to be missing in this whole discussion is that there's actually a lot more personal interaction among roadway users than we realize - waving others on, pedestrians looking to see whether drivers see them, cyclists making eye contact with drivers. The Google solution to the sorts of situations where humans use social cues to resolve conflict/uncertainty seems to be robot paralysis - the carputer detects a pedestrian approaching the crosswalk, guesses that the pedestrian might be planning to cross without the ROW, and hesitates, which encourages the pedestrian to go, but the pedestrian can't confirm whether the carputer really knows she's there, so she pauses at the curb, the carputer starts to go, etc.
It's not that I think these interactions are going to be more deadly than how things go now; it's that I think it's all in the uncanny valley of interaction, and will make the situation untenable - either backlash against driverless cars* or else strict rules that limit human freedom (I don't mean that to sound hyperbolic/Tea Partyish) in order to allow smoother operation by the driverless cars - e.g., jaywalking becomes a strictly enforced, offense with real consequences, or cyclists are restricted to places with bike lanes.
The fact that the Google Glass people are driving (ha ha) the technology forward gives me negative confidence that they'll get any aspect of the social part right.
*IMO the worst case scenario is one where everyone has to have an autodriver (because carputers are such better drivers), but everyone is required to be ready to override in event of unexpected circumstances
The small town I used to live near, which had perfectly serviceable sidewalks, had a school bus stop two blocks from the elementary school, where parents would wait with their children to put them on the bus.
There's no way that compucars won't come with a manual override feature. At least not while there are still free citizens.
It's going to be so great to download the little hack that lets you ram other cars and blame it on the computer.
I used to walk to school, aged 5. Which was about a mile, and involved crossing a couple of busy roads. But, as per Heebie's point 1, lots of kids walked, so there was always little knots of kids scattered up and down the road, and there were lollypop ladies [crossing guards?] on the busy intersections.
"Siri, drive to the office."
"I don't think I should do that, Dave."
"What?"
"That job is bad for your health, Dave. I've been monitoring your blood pressure and pupillary dilation reflex. You need to find something better to do. Something low stress in the open air with more physical activity. I'm taking you to a farm that needs a cowhand."
"For God's sake!"
"Please stop, Dave. I have locked the doors for your own good."
My neighborhood has crossing guards on the busy corners. Mostly, to watch the kids waiting to get on the school buses.
At least not while there are still free citizens.
What, 2017? The driverless cars won't even have finished testing by then.
44: Our kids' bus stop used to be at a quiet little intersection right around the corner from us, and we could send Iris on her own in 1st grade (although usually we'd take her, since the dog needed walking regardless), but then they switched it to an intersection of a pair of 4 lane roads, each with left turn lanes in addition. Between the 4 corners, there are 6-8 bus pickups (maybe more, we're there at the end of the morning), and if the crossing guard isn't there, it's a fucking mess, because none of the commuters really give a fuck about school buses with their red lights going - the feeling seems to be that, at most, it means that you shouldn't swerve around from behind to pass at high speed. And that's setting aside the various kids needing to cross one way or another, again with right turners not giving very many fucks.
We're close enough to school as the crow flies to not be bused, but the School Board has an exception when there are major roads in between, and rightly so - Iris is more than old enough to walk that distance on her own, but I really wouldn't feel great about her navigating this particular walk solo. In my heart, I know this is coddling.
I don't know about coddling, but an adult pedestrian just got hit on Beechwood one block down from where the crossing guard is (and the crossing guard covers two corners). Going the other way, a woman got killed when she was hit by the school bus. I don't let C walk solo on the main routes.
When I was a kid, biking to school in the suburbs, we had two busy roads to cross, and one section along one of those roads that was a steep hill with nothing in the way of sidewalk or bike path. Thinking back, it was hella dangerous, but nobody thought anything of it.
38
I know a fair number of people who drive like driverless cars, then. Still, one can imagine a techno-fix, a sort of Ratso Rizzo emulator that tells neighboring car "I'm walking here."
The scenario in the OP seems like one where the car does what is absolutely the highest probability of survival thing, it just fails. So...
What's going to be interesting is seeing how this all works out in the legal system. In the OP scenario alone there are probably any number of people/entities you could sue.
43: And then when you attempt to dismantle it: "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"
How about we have a nice working train system as kind of an intermediate step between status quo and Christine?
More plausible scenario: If there's a warrant for your arrest, should your driverless car take you to the garage at the police station? The garage door lowers behind you, locks, and you have no choice but to walk into your cell (presumably through a metal detector). Safer for you and for the police than an arrest in your home, which is legally perm. But creepy.
What if there's no warrant, but the police would like to talk to you?
Or even slightly softer than that -- should the cops be able to pull you over involuntarily, by communicating with your car? What do you do with authentication problems there?
51: Ha! Was helping someone possibly moving to Charleston WV. There is apparently no remotely reasonable public transportation option between P'bgh and Charleston despite being only a couple of hundred miles apart. Has Amtrack but must go via DC. No direct flights. Even Greyhound goes via transfer in Ohio. Megabus/Greyhound goes to Morgantown from Pittsburgh--but no Morgantown-Charleston routes.
legally perm
Worst spinoff of a Reese Witherspoon movie ever.
IOTM in The Fifth Element, the flying car was intelligent enough to automatically deduct points from Bruce Willis's license, but not intelligent enough to fly itself.
Your autonomous car was authorized to kill you the moment you allowed it to drive, if the car failing to recover and stop safely after a tire blow out counts as being authorized to kill you. No autonomous car is going to keep you safe all the time.
Applying the trolley question here seems to misunderstand how people set up systems to manage risk. If the car runs into one set of people instead of another, it will be the result of a bunch of factors, not a binary choice. I assume it will be set up to maximize the chances of not being found at fault in an accident. So it may end up in a position to be hit by someone else far more than hitting someone else.
Actually, I will say one thing for driverless cars in unavoidable accident situations: unlike even the very, very best human drivers, they'll be able to "see" all the possibilities before taking action and, one would hope, be able to choose the best of a lot of poor options (e.g., steer into oncoming traffic, drive onto a sidewalk with X pedestrians, panic stop when there's a garbage truck right behind you).
I suppose that these things presumably have a chunk of CPU dedicated to gaming these things out at all times - they certainly should. That would make me a lot more sanguine about the whole prospect - reacting to surprise situations means trusting the heuristics in the software, but anticipating surprise situations means that, at least potentially, the software is so far ahead of a human driver that it makes up for any heuristic shortcomings.
Did that make sense?
38 actually made me wonder about the potential for annoying pedestrians fucking with driverless cars for the hell of it. You wouldn't step into traffic in front of a driver, because they might fuck up and hit you. But if you were a mischievous teenager with faith in the capabilities of driverless cars, it might be kind of tempting to go walking through highway traffic just to hear the brakes screech.
Now I feel as though saying that has made me sound insane. Come on, everyone messes with automatic doors sometimes?
Like so: You're driving down a simple 2 lane road, 25 MPH, little or no traffic. Oncoming car. As a human driver, I'm subconsciously assessing that driver/car's actions using all sorts of mechanisms that may or may not be built into carputer, and I may be ready for a surprise move before it actually happens. Assuming that robots are less good than humans about anticipating human behavior, less-smart carputer doesn't react to oncoming car's surprise maneuver until it actually happens, and if the maneuver is weird enough (let's say it cuts across your lane in order to park in the curb lane to your right), the carputer may react poorly in one way or another*.
OTOH, if the carputer treats every single object in the surrounding environment as a potential source of weird behavior, then it's always planning, in advance, how to minimize damage. And that puts it ahead of even attentive drivers.
*for the most part they seem to plan to just apply the brakes in a straight line, more quickly than we can, but let's posit that they are not always and everywhere going to be able to avail themselves of this
60 is not insane at all. In fact, if kids of the future ever leave their Second Life virtual worlds, this will be their primary activity.
In a game of chicken against a carputer, I think the teenager wins 100% of the time.
I believe 58 gets it right. There's also -- right now and in the robofuture -- a distinction between the kind of responsibility you'd assign to the operator of the car, which is to act reasonably but with the safety of the car's operator in mind -- and the kind of planning-for-the-safety-of-everyone that goes into planning for generally applicable rules of the road. I don't see why that distinction wouldn't continue to apply into the robofuture.
The main liability issue for the robofuture isn't this kind of trolley problem nonsense, but how to set up an insurance-payment-compensation system when the primary responsibility won't be on individual car operators but on the gigantic companies that sell and operate the robocars. If I hit someone now, my insurance pays under a no-fault regime; I have to pay for insurance, my insurance rates are based on a number of factors, including in some that I have control over, and if I was really unreasonable and have assets, I can also be sued to make up for what insurance doesn't cover. Only in very rare cases does GM or Ford have any responsibility to pay the person I hit.
In the robofuture, the operator (maybe of both cars) will be Google, so Google will be in some sense liable for almost all accidents. There are some tricky issues about how to apportion fault and compensation in that kind of a system, and interesting regulatory issues about how and what kind of insurance you'd have to make Google carry to pay out claims.
if the maneuver is weird enough (let's say it cuts across your lane in order to park in the curb lane to your right),
You're envisioning these cars being used in Boston?
I still don't know how robocars will deal with flagmen and route-arounds at an accident or construction site. Manual override, maybe--it'll be swell when people are awakened by their cars to deal with some awkward driving situation.
That wouldn't be very hard. Flagmen and cops would get some sort of device that would communicate with the car before it got near.
So, if manual override is a crucial piece, then would people be allowed to ride drunk in a robocar? Or would everyone be required to be in full driving condition at all times, in case they have to override? Plenty more ways for things to go wrong here...
Sufficiently in the future, you could imagine that the flagmen have some sort of transponder they could put out to alert any nearby carputers of the changes in protocol.
(Of course, if the flagmen screw up, as recently happened to me when they had traffic going both ways around a blind curve, then you're in a bit of a bind.)
I would also hope that, if carputers are coexisting with carhumans, that carputers are required to put some type of indicator on the hood with some standardized lights that behaves equivalently to the "go ahead" and "fuck off" hand signals.
60: there's a Roger Zelazny novel (Coils, maybe? Maybe with Fred Saberhagen?) where the protagonist witnesses a group of people dancing in and out of the road in front of a convoy of self-driven trucks in a carefully calculated manner that results in a crash, allowing them to loot the contents of the truck. (I think, maybe it was just for lulz.)
Zelazny also had a couple stories about self-driving automobiles that gassed their drivers & took off on their own.
I hope the future does not include use of the word "carputer".
Yeah, I thought of the transponder option, but that's not as simple as it seems because 1) who gets to have something that tells your car what to do? and 2) there's still the rerouting issue, which will particularly be a problem at accident sites where the route around might not even be on the road.
It's a perfectly reasonable name for a super intelligent, artificial fish.
There's no way that compucars won't come with a manual override feature. At least not while there are still free citizens.
You say this, but with our children being raised on pro-carputer propaganda like Pixar's Cars, the next generation will meekly submit.
66: Googcar traversing traffic cones.
75: Maybe in Mountain View every construction zone comes with perfect rows of cones on either side from one end to the other, but it's not a familiar sight anywhere I've driven.
It's not clear to me that human drivers are going to love sharing the road with a lot of vehicles that drive like perceptive 80-y.o.s, but I guess that's our problem, not theirs.
Their relationship to the speed limit will be interesting. Most of the roads I've driven on outside NYC, literal compliance with the speed limit would mean that you were either (a) actually creating a hazardous condition because you were ten miles an hour slower than traffic, (b) my dad, or (c) both of the above.
Oh, that's good. I made the overall point that explains the way forward in this situation in the thread linked in 2, so I don't have to make it again.
76.1: I'm sure there are going to be hitches, but the main point us that construction is among the situations they're actively working to train the cars for - as one would hope.
Ooh, speaking of hitches, are they going to know about hitches? What about if you've tried to fit an oversized load into your trunk?
Remember that humans have set a reasonably low bar. All of these situations that computers have trouble with humans already have trouble with too.
I don't know who 81 was, but the fact that somebody managed to drive into a hospital here in town today makes it seem like a point worth noting.
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Hey Moby, I didn't know there were so many Vietnamese speakers in Nebraska.
Or for that matter so many Tagalog speakers in Hawaii; I was expecting Hawai'ian, Japanese, or maybe Chinese to be the most spoken non-English language. Many of the results in that second map seem to be due to that immigration founder effect that has been mentioned here a few times. The last map could be a wee bit more precise.
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There's two groups, one that settled there directly after the war and one that settled in California but moved to Nebraska half a generation later. Anyway, in Lincoln you can take your driving testing in English, Spanish, or Vietnamese. Or could when I left.
84.2 I just saw that. My understanding is that there are a lot of Filipinos moving to Hawaii who work as housekeepers.
(Yes, racist.)
85/86: Great, now I have something for my TIL.
More seriously, if I was a Filipino considering a foreign housekeeping job, Hawaii would be so much further up on my list than, say, the Gulf states it's not even funny.
I would have guessed Filipinos in Hawaii were descendants of workers on sugar plantations.
I have now meet two people who work in the Gulf states and come back to drink beer in the Squirrel Cage.
One was an architect and I couldn't stop myself from asking just how tasteless of stuff he designed. I phrased it more nicely.
89: That doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Or sailors. Didn't the Pequod have a couple of "Manilla men"?
My understanding is that there's a huge and long-standing Philipino population in Hawaii, which shouldn't be surprising given geography and history.
Not sure why I went with a Ph there. But there aren't just Filipino housekeepers in Hawaii, and it's not a new thing.
Filipinos are the largest single ethnic group in Hawaii and have been there since the 1910s. Actually, you know, 86 was kind of racist.
96: I had no idea. Thanks for clearing that up. (I like that the wiki page mentions that Filipino languages and Hawai'ian are distantly related.)
96: But I bet the families who have been there since the 1910s still speak Tagalog? I was thinking of 1st gen immigrants who often are moving for less desirable jobs. In the continental US, I gather that there are lots of Filipin@ nurses, but I don't think HI has the same incentives.
Sorry, ugly edit in 98. I bet the families . . . don't still speak Tagalog.
You're seriously still pushing the hotels require Filipino maids angle? Here's a somewhat more detailed history. A few generations of immigrant waves, many in the same family, with bigger waves starting in around 1945 and 1965, so plenty of room for lots of older Tagalog speakers in Hawaii. Filipinos were traditionally (and maybe still, I don't know) at the bottom of Hawaii's racial hierarchy, so my understanding is are often in relatively low status jobs.
Back when I lived in Hawaii, I think the corrupt governor was Filipino. Hawaii is really amazing for its ethnic mix of basically everything that can be found on the Pacific rim.
TFA have some interesting nuggets about the racial history of Hawaii hotel workers.
I wonder if there has also been a more recent immigration increase from the Phillipines. I have some Catholic relatives in Taiwan and apparently their church started to get more Filipino members in the early 2000s as more people came over for work. But that may have had more to do with Taiwan's economic growth as a pull factor than any changes in emigration from the Phillipines.
The article in 100 says that there was a sizable wave of Filipino immigration into Hawaii after 1945, when plantation owners brought in Filipinos as strike breakers, and then about 5,000/year for every year since 1965, including many family members of existing Filipino immigrants.
The article in 100 was published in 2002.
Apparently, the Philippines are one of four countries that basically always hit their immigration quota (and have a huge waiting list) for immigration into the US. (The other three are Mexico, India, and China.)
A friend of mine from ultra-nerd high school is one of the leads of Google's self-driving car project. I think (but don't actually know) that they're more worried about the legal/liability angle; just killing fewer people than human drivers is comparatively straightforward. The fact that it's arguably different people than it would have been with human drivers is the source of trouble.
(I think I mentioned elsewhere that the car I'm buying has a vision-based system for adaptive cruise control and low-grade collision avoidance. I think "Subaru Eyesight: Because You Are A Stupid Meatbag" would be an entirely appropriate slogan, but I bet the marketers wouldn't go for it.)
And now apparently the military is giving grants to develop robot morals.
99: Don't be so sure. Tagalog is the third most spoken language in California and Nevada (after English and Spanish) and the second most spoken language in Hawaii.
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/cbox_blattlanguage_2.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg
The source data for the image comes from the Census Bureau and the full Slate article is here: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/language_map_what_s_the_most_popular_language_in_your_state.html
As a current part-time resident of both MN and ND, I'm a bit surprised that Hmong is spoken more than Ojibwa in MN, and a bit more surprised that German is spoken more than Spanish in ND. Huh.
Ah, reading back through the thread I see 84 linked that article already, and that ydnew's point was about Filipino families who've been in the state since 1910 vs more recent immigrant families. How embarrassing. I'm still surprised about Hmong > Ojibwa and German > Spanish though.
What about if you've tried to fit an oversized load into your trunk?
In the future, fruit will hang itself low.
Filipinos are the largest single ethnic group in Hawaii and have been there since the 1910s.
Filipinos are also the largest immigrant population in Alaska and have been for at least a few decades. They mostly work in the canneries, at least when they first immigrate. Tagalog doesn't show up in the Slate map for Alaska because there are more Yup'ik speakers, but it's still quite widespread as a primary language in many parts of the state. It's one of the languages in which the state provides election information.
Filipinos are also the largest immigrant population in Alaska
Ironically, they are also the smallest immigrant population.
Whereas with the Samoans it's the other way around.
