I’m not sure if this is going to come up in the way proposed in the article. Given a potential collision, before even calculating whether or not it is unavoidable or not, the car is likely going to start reducing speed by using the brakes, because generally that’s what you need to do in almost all collisions. (The very high percent that aren’t of this type.)
But once the car has jammed on the brakes, it has cut off a great deal of its ability to do any swerves. These types of cases may be so rare that giving the car the fractional second to make those calculations may lead to more deaths than just hitting the brakes sooner in all cases would.
From a utilitarian ethics point of view, I suspect the design decision may be something like “We will save 10X lives per billion vehicle miles if the car precommits to always reduce speed without thinking about it, even if we would save X more lives by thinking about how to pick swerve in certain cases… but we can’t do that without NOT saving the 10X lives from immediate precommitment.”
Although, once we actually have more data on self driving car crashes, I would not be surprised if I have to rethink some of the above.
I’m not sure if this is going to come up in the way proposed in the article. Given a potential collision, before even calculating whether or not it is unavoidable or not, the car is likely going to start reducing speed by using the brakes, because generally that’s what you need to do in almost all collisions. (The very high percent that aren’t of this type.)
But once the car has jammed on the brakes, it has cut off a great deal of its ability to do any swerves. These types of cases may be so rare that giving the car the fractional second to make those calculations may lead to more deaths than just hitting the brakes sooner in all cases would.
From a utilitarian ethics point of view, I suspect the design decision may be something like “We will save 10X lives per billion vehicle miles if the car precommits to always reduce speed without thinking about it, even if we would save X more lives by thinking about how to pick swerve in certain cases… but we can’t do that without NOT saving the 10X lives from immediate precommitment.”
Although, once we actually have more data on self driving car crashes, I would not be surprised if I have to rethink some of the above.