Not in My Autonomous Car, Thank You Very Much

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MSI
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Not in My Autonomous Car, Thank You Very Much

Post by MSI »

From MIT Technology Review:
  • Not in My Autonomous Car, Thank You Very Much
    • If your self-driving car had to kill you, the driver, or a pedestrian who stepped out in front of it, which should it choose? Philosophers are already grappling with those kinds of questions, but a new series of surveys published in Science today reveals a potentially more important set of opinions on the topic—namely those of the general public that will be buying the cars. There’s a strong not-in-my-back-yard vibe to the results: people approve of autonomous vehicles that might sacrifice passengers to save the lives of others—but they wouldn’t want to ride in such a vehicle themselves. Of course, turning the situation into a binary decision—us or them—oversimplifies the situation that autonomous cars may find themselves in, where there will almost always be scope to at least try and save the lives of all of the parties involved. But we still need to know how the cars should behave in the worst case. As the Harvard psychologist Joshua D. Greene writes:
      • “Before we can put our values into machines, we have to figure out how to make our values clear and consistent.”
      So far, we seem to be struggling.