Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
You've missed the point. The question isn't whether from a purely consequentialist view, these cars will result in fewer fatalities. The question is, who is making the moral decisions that determine who lives and dies in the circumstances I set out. Essentially, this could be considered the first trial run of inputting morality into an AI... Even if that morality is applied automatically.
Someone is eventually going to have to program these things to, for example, determine whether it should avoid hitting an old person in favour of a young one. That's a moral choice. If an engineer decides to say, "yes, that's the right moral choice", that decision will likely have life and death consequences. Do we think that's a decision best left to the engineer? There are going to be more and more examples like this as time goes on.
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At the point where a car could tell the age of a pedestrian I don't think accidents will be the issue, instead I am sure we would be struggling with how to fight them off as they will have grown self aware and realize they can use our body heat to charge their batteries.
On a serious note there would be no need to program morality. The operating system would respond in the only way it would be programmed.... traffic law. It wouldn't drive on the curb to avoid an accident it would stop. And if it didn't stop in time it would crash. There would be no morality involved in traffic law.