Comment by XorNot
4 hours ago
It was an entire media beat up because the media was too afraid to talk about anything real and the public not interested.
There's plenty we could talk about: i.e. the failure scenarios of shallow reasoning systems, the serious limitations on the resolution and capability of the actual Tesla cameras used for navigation, the failure modes of LIDAR etc.
Instead we got "what if the car calculates the trolley problem against you?"
And observationally, proof a staggering number of people don't know their road rules (since every variant of it consists of concocting some scenario where slamming on the brakes is done at far too late but you somehow know perfectly well there's not a preschool behind the nearest brick wall or something).
I remember running some basic numbers on this in an argument and you basically wind up at, assuming an AI is fast enough to detect a situation, it's sufficiently fast that it would literally always be able to stop the car with the brakes, or no level of aggressive manoeuvring would avoid the collision.
Which is of course what the road rules are: you slam on the brakes. Every other option is worse and gets even worse when an AI can brake quicker and faster if its smart enough to even consider other options.
> Which is of course what the road rules are: you slam on the brakes.
Yeah, there are a shocking number of accidents which basically amount to "they tried to swerve and it went badly".
You can concoct a few scenarios where other drivers are violating the road rules so much as to basically be trying to murder you -- the simplest example is "you are stopped at a light and a giant truck is barreling towards you too fast to stop".
If you are a normal driver, you probably learn about this when you wake up in the hospital, but an autonomous vehicle could be watching how fast vehicles are approaching from behind you. There's going to be a wide range of scenarios where it will be clear the truck is not going to stop but there's still time to do something (for instance, a truck going 65mph takes around 5 seconds to stop, so if it's halfway through its stopping distance, you've got around 2.5 seconds to maneuver out of the way).
That does leave you all sorts of room to come up with realistic trolley problems.
> That does leave you all sorts of room to come up with realistic trolley problems
But all require a human (or malicious) driver on one hand. The more rule-following AVs on the road, the fewer the opportunities for such trolley problems.
And I'd still argue that debating these ex ante is, while philosophically fascinating, not a practical discussion. I'm not seeing a case where one would code anything further than collision avoidance and e.g. pre-activating restraints.
Yeah, realistically the problems almost never happen and hopefully become rarer over time.
The typical human preference WRT the trolly problem ("don't take an action which leads to deaths, even if it would save more lives") is also a reasonable -- maybe the only reasonable answer -- to these hypotheticals.
Ie, move against the light to avoid getting rear ended, but not if you're going to run over a pedestrian or cause an accident with another vehicle trying to do so. (Even if getting rear ended would push you into the pedestrian or other car.)