Interesting moral test on automated cars. Post your results.

I'll take the test later after I wake up a bit more.

For now I'll say this:

I am totally against self-driving cars. If a person can not pay attention and drive properly, do not get behind the wheel of a car.

 

I think the companies are going about it the wrong way. We aren't there yet with AI making those decisions.

First they needed to make it work on open highways where people get fatigued driving in a straight line for hours on end. Then make it work on highways in cities and with more traffic. Then make the system warn you about traffic lights and stop signs in the city. Braking when cars stop in front of you is important too, also being able to see stopped traffic ahead of the car in front of you that swerves at the last moment would reduce the number of crashes.

The end goal of reducing the number of car fatalities from 10x worse than 9/11 each year is an important goal that we should have funded instead of a bunch of wars in the desert, but it will be decades before enough of the self driving cars are out there to make a difference, and who knows if they are smart enough right now to talk to each other, or if there will be a standard so one brand can't talk to a different one.

 

Always save the puppy.

 

Self-driving cars are definitely on the way, and they will be much, much safer than human drivers. A self-driving car is constantly looking in all directions, never gets distracted, and can react to potential danger much more quickly than a human can.

It's still not an easy problem, given how varied the road environment can be. That thing in the middle of your lane up ahead: is that a blowing plastic bag or a fallen rock? That bicyclist at the corner: could he dart out in front of you? That red light that never changes: do you sit there all night waiting, or give up and defy the rules?

There will be a transition period with a mix of human and non-human drivers, similar to the mix of cars and horsedrawn vehicles in the 1920s.

People in the future will be shocked at how hazardous car travel was, back in 2016.

 

I want to comment on something that compromises the blindedness of this experiment. Click on the spoiler button below only if you've already completed judging 13 random scenarios on the Moral Machine website.

This questionnaire isn't really about self-driving cars. The premise is used as a high-tech spin on the classic "trolley problem" that makes the question more relevant to modern interests. This experiment rather appears to be an exercise in descriptive ethics to study social values and stigmas of gender, age, weight, occupation, and criminality. The utility of this data for programming the computers of self-driving cars seems scant, or at least it will be until engineers in machine vision are able to design signal processing systems that accurately model these human characteristics.

 

Automated vehicles will never exceed or even match drivers who actually pay attention to traffic and react before hitting the brakes is required. That group of drivers excludes my wife .

 

And just about everybody else, too...

 

I think the biggest issue will be the ownership one. People own their cars and leave stuff in them and can take them places, but with insurance rates going up and the prices of these vehicles increasing, will Uber and Lyft (maybe Google & Apple) take over? I have done fine without a car except for renting one to travel home for the holidays (I don't need a car to get to work). But having a time-share arrangement or fractional ownership like yachts might be a thing. I could see a subscription type of model too. Maybe a new HOA or apartment building would buy a few to appeal to people without cars that could be shared.

But without something big happening, I don't see a 100% automated car being desirable. I could see it being 100% automated during long stretches of boring highway, but people do like to drive sometimes and I worry that the vehicle AI won't know what to do when there is some idiot driver on the road, or some weird event happens.

 

Very few of those drivers live in & around Houston.

Maybe in the future we'll have dedicated lanes for fully automated vehicles, and dedicated lanes for the people who actually want to drive.

 

EthicalGame

Whether its logical or not you should try and avoid disaster rather than just hit people - so I picked going into the barrier every time (pretty questionable why a concrete barrier is set up in the middle of the road)
I tried to save kids over adults
women over men
working age over elderly
humans over dogs

but the test doesnt tell me what sort of person that makes me. I did score "saves more lives" higher than average at least.

 

I haven't taken the test, but let me ask does it tell you about the persons your deciding on to kill? What are their morals and ethics? C'mon in some cases an accident could be doing the good of all man kind a favor. Let me choose between a tax paying citizen and a leach, makes my decision simple.

 

I took the test. Apparently I'm biased towards saving females and the young.

With very few exceptions I found that most of the scenarios were:
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
A rock and a hard place.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
No clearly good/proper choices over clearly bad/improper choices.

I also think many people will ignore the "passengers will die." A passenger in a new(er) vehicle with modern safety features would have a much better chance of surviving than the pedestrians.

I don't see how the test has anything to do with automated vehicles. The artificial "intelligence" would have no way of knowing the sex, age, social status, etc. of the pedestrians or the passengers.

 

I think I did something wrong. I thought you were supposed to maximize the kills....

 

Okay went back and took the test, I hope they don't revoke my drivers license. Hahaha