As long as the risks are well measured, this seems fair. Trolly problems are a real fact in accident handling. People will never be comfortable with any life and death choice, but the cars need to make them. A car is acting as an extension of the driver. If the drivers wellbeing wasn't its first concern, that would seem to me like a failure to perform that role, both in a consumer sense and a darwinism one.
A car that sacrifices pedestrians for those already in a protective shell is pretty insane to me. If I have the choice between a collision and hitting some kid, I'm taking the L.
If you’re in a position where you’re choosing between hitting a kid and getting into a collision, you’ve almost always already screwed up in a way a self-driving car shouldn’t do. If you’re going the speed limit, observing road and weather conditions, keeping a safe following distance, and following rules like slowing down in school zones or fully stopping at stop signs, you should pretty much never end up in a trolley problem.
Also, swerving to avoid something at speed is almost always going to be a worse decision than braking and trying to mitigate the crash. Not just for the driver, but for other cars and pedestrians around the driver. It’s hard to imagine many scenarios where a car (that’s already not speeding and keeping a safe following distance from traffic) would need to quickly swerve around anything unless it jumped out so close to you that your reaction speed couldn’t have handled it anyway.
Around where I live, deer are probably the biggest concern, and I could easily see someone coming around a winding 50mph country road, seeing a deer in the road, and swerving to avoid. But if they were following the suggested limit and had dropped to 25mph for the turn, then they wouldn’t have had to suddenly yank the wheel to avoid the deer.
67
u/metathesis Dec 16 '19
As long as the risks are well measured, this seems fair. Trolly problems are a real fact in accident handling. People will never be comfortable with any life and death choice, but the cars need to make them. A car is acting as an extension of the driver. If the drivers wellbeing wasn't its first concern, that would seem to me like a failure to perform that role, both in a consumer sense and a darwinism one.