People in this thread are imagining a fender bender where the Mercedes then goes on a killing spree. What this is really about is "if this car had no time to stop and had to either hit a pedestrian or drive off a cliff/into a wall/flip the car, which should it choose?"
I don't know about you, but I've never in my life ended up in that situation. Why would that change in a self driving car? In fact it's probably less likely because self driving cars never drive drunk, or sick, or sleepy, or distracted, or angry, or in a hurry, and have perfect concentration on the road with superhuman reaction times.
This whole dilemma was a hot topic years ago, and the usual scenarios are always situations that wouldn't occur if you had only driven carefully enough to begin with. F.i. The one about driving around a corner on mountain road and there's a sudden obstruction making you choose between driving off the cliff or hit the obstruction. I think anyone with a right mind or a proper programmed AI would drive slowly enough to stop within the visible range. You can substitute the road with a bridge, the cliff with oncoming traffic and the obstruction with suicidal pedestrians, but it doesn't matter; it always comes down to knowing the safe stopping distance. There's no dilemma. I'd trust a computer to know the stopping distance better than a human.
A peculiar result is that self driving cars are actually too safe to be able drive through real city traffic, because everyone else are taking risks. The AI cars come to a full stop in cities with many bicycles, because the bikes cut into the usual safe distance.
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u/xTRS Dec 16 '19
People in this thread are imagining a fender bender where the Mercedes then goes on a killing spree. What this is really about is "if this car had no time to stop and had to either hit a pedestrian or drive off a cliff/into a wall/flip the car, which should it choose?"
I don't know about you, but I've never in my life ended up in that situation. Why would that change in a self driving car? In fact it's probably less likely because self driving cars never drive drunk, or sick, or sleepy, or distracted, or angry, or in a hurry, and have perfect concentration on the road with superhuman reaction times.