The Self-Driving Dilemma: Should Your Car Kill You To Save Others?
In a split-second, the car has to make a choice with moral—and mortal—consequences. Three pedestrians have just blindly stumbled into an oncoming crosswalk. With no time to slow down, your autonomous car will either hit the pedestrians or swerve off the road, probably crashing and endangering your life. Who should be saved?
A team of three psychologists and computer scientists, led by Jean-François Bonnefon at the University of Toulouse Capitole in France, just completed an extensive study on this ethical quandary. They ran half a dozen online surveys posing various forms of this question to U.S. residents, and found an ever-present dilemma in peoples' responses. "Most people want to live a world in which everybody owns driverless cars that minimize casualties," says Iyad Rahwan, a computer scientist with the team at MIT, "but they want their own car to protect them at all costs."
This isn't just a trivial riddle or a new take on the trolley problem thought exercise. Now that computers are driving large metal machines that can kill, they'll have to be programmed to make these kinds of decisions. "It's a rather contrived and abstract scenario, but we realize that those are the sorts of decisions that autonomous vehicles are going to have to be programmed to make," says Azime Chariff, a psychological researcher with the team at the University of Oregon
"It's also a big challenge to the widescale adoption of autonomous vehicles, especially when there's already a basic fear about entrusting a computer program to zip us around at 60 miles an hour or more," he says. "So we conducted a series of online experiments to gauge how people were thinking about these ethical scenarios and how comfortable they would be to buy autonomous vehicles that were programmed in various ways." The survey results are outlined today the the journal Science .
Tags
Who is online
83 visitors
There is a big "but" coming. When given the option of hypothetically buying a self-driving car that's utilitarian (it saves the greatest number of people) or one that's selfish (programmed to save its passenger at all costs) people are quick to buy the selfish option. When it comes to utilitarian cars, "they tell us that it's great if other people get these cars, but I prefer not to have one myself," says Bonifan.
Economists call this feeling a social dilemma. It's a bit like how most people view paying taxes. Yeah, everyone should do it. But nobody is too keen on doing it themselves.
You have to wonder if a buyer choses a auto that is programmed to save his life at all costs what the legal ramifications will be.
Then only people who can afford it will have totally safe cars for them.
This is an interesting study. I guess my question would be why wouldn't the car be able to sense these situations in advance? The technology today can already stop vehicles on it's own. Couldn't we assume that the technology was advanced enough to sense pedestrians or other objects in a far reaching range that pose potential situations and predict it's course of action "just in case". If we have this technology wouldn't we also have other technology that pedestrians could use in which it would alert the pedestrian?
I think how people answer questions is generally in a way that we think we "should' answer the questions. It's a personality test almost. And no one wants to be thought of as warped so you're going to say that you would choose the least casualty outcome (IMO). Of course, I would always choose the least amount of casualties......
Would you carefully look what's ahead of you while someone is about to T-bone your car ?
I do not want a self-driving car. I don't even want a car that turns down the radio for me, if I come to a stop. Frankly, I'm not about to drive a car that does that much for me. I want the free will to be able to drive off a cliff, if I want to.
Where we've been lately, the road signs have been a combination of these:
We've been to Kevil, Tulu, Marion, Kuttawa, Wickliffe, and Barstow, KY, Cave in Rock, IL, Fairdealing, Donophan, Briar, Many Springs, and Rover, MO... I can truly say I've been nearly everywhere that has a population of less that 300 souls in Western KY, Southern IL, and Southern MO... If not this trip, on others... We've been behind every kind of farm implement known to mankind, seen all kinds of livestock, etc. It's been quite a trip!!! We've had so much fun, but GEEMONETTI, some of these roads suck! We could even add to these signs... Like the curve at the top of the hill, where one is jettisoned off the road and into a farm pond, or the hills that make your car stand on its nose and twirl around as you figure out where the road goes.... Or last, that brief glimpse of the road in the distance and one wonders, how on earth to I get there? Oh, down this hill, around this banked curve that a turtle couldn't cross, jump over this farm pond and twirl around to finally have a brief straight stretch up to the heavens...
Still, I want to be able to drive myself, even one-eyed, shaky, and old...
Wow Lady Dowser. You are on quite an adventure. I asked my hubby if he wanted to go travel around and visit every State and he looked at me kinda funny and asked "Why"? I'm like.....duh, to see every State in the Country. He just shook his head and said "I can pull it up on the internet and see them just fine". He's gonna be a lonely fellow one day cause this girls going on a "ROAD TRIP"!!!! I'm soooooo jealous. I hope you're taking pictures! You should do a daily diary for us. :o)
I'm going to post some pictures in an article, soon! I just have to get them fixed up! They will not be of A. Mac's quality, although you may enjoy some of them... I hope!
LOL, your having quite the trip, Dowser...I've never seen the sign of the guy with an umbrella and raining cows....
It's in KY somewhere... I love it! There were cows up on the road cuts-- they must have gotten out somehow. I expected them to rain down on us...
Highway 160 had all of those signs but the cows and the implement. No matter, we found an implement anyway. Not sure what it was, a thing with disks on the back that had metal shoots coming off of it-- it looked like a giant weed eater. I'm not a farm girl, even though I used to raise cattle... I can still identify cows, which is neat, considering it was so long ago.
It is no ordinary umbrella which can protect against falling cows . Sounds like BULL to me !
ONe's imagination can run wild on some of these roads... I especially like the one I came up with in my head-- the one that spits you off the side of the hill into a pond... About half the time, that's what it has been like.
These are some of NY's best:
And a NYC classic.. parking regulations:
I love these! Most of our signs seems to point to the same highway in opposite directions, (I know that is normal, after all, you can take the same road either west or east, but when the sign says 3 directions, it gets confusing!!!)
Same with me. I knew what every sign meant except the cow over the umbrella. It looks like a Chagall painting.
Maybe it was, and converted to a road sign... With cows up on the road cuts, one expects them to rain down...
It's common to hear the expression "It's raining cats and dogs" but I guess if you're in cow country......
Autonomous cars wouldn't work in China - they won't cut corners, block intersections, or go through red traffic signals.