Comment by JumpCrisscross
5 hours ago
> 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.)