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Lalartu comments on [LINK] Utilitarian self-driving cars? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (44)
It should act in favor of its passengers of course.
Why 'of course'? This doesn't seem obvious to me.
Probably because almost every other safety decision in a cars design is focused on the occupants.
those reinforced bars protecting the passenger: Do you think they care if they mean that any car hitting the side of the car suffers more damage due to hitting a more solid structure?
They want to sell the cars, thus they likely want the cars priorities to be somewhat in line with the buyer. They buyer doesn't care all much about the toddler in the other car except in a philosophical sense. They care about the toddler in their own car. The person is not the priority of the seller or the buyer.
In terms of liability it makes sense to try to make sure that the accident remains legally the fault of the other party no matter the number of deaths and the law rarely accepts intentionally harming one person who wasn't at fault in order to avoid an accident and spare the lives of a car with 2 people who were at fault themselves.
Makes sense. Though the design of a motion control algorithm where the inverse dynamics model interacts with a road law expect system to make decisions in a fraction of a second would be... interesting.
HungryHobo gave good arguments from tradition and liability; here's an argument from utility:
Google's cars are up over a million autonomously-driven km without an accident. That's not proof that they're safer than the average human-driven car (something like 2 accidents per million km in the US?) but it's mounting evidence. If car AI written to prioritize its passengers turns out to still be an order of magnitude safer for third parties than human drivers, then the direct benefit of optimizing for total safety may be outweighed by the indirect benefit of optimizing for own-passenger safety and thereby enticing more rapid adoption of the technology.
They'd be better off using a shared algorithm if involved in a situation with cars reasoning in a similar fashion.
This is definitely a case for superrationality. If antagonists in an accident are equipped, communicate. Not sure what to do about human participants, though.
This issue brought up seems to greatly overestimate the probability of crashing into something. IIRC, the main reason people crash is because 1) they oversteer and 2) they steer to where they're looking, and they often look in the direction of the nearest or most inevitable obstacle.
These situations would involve human error almost every time, and crashing would be most likely due to the human driver crashing into the autocar, not the other way around. Something that would increase the probability would be human error in heavy traffic.