With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Even if we still have 10-20k deaths/year from automated driving systems, that's still a large improvement.
This argument about the ethics of contrived car accident scenarios totally misses the boat. In my opinion the only ethical argument is to move over to fully automated driving systems as soon as -safely- possible.
Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological.
The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.
What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen.
I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
As someone who spends more time cycling than driving, watching videos like this[1] give me more confidence in today’s self-driving technology (assuming good conditions) than in most drivers on the road, even knowing that any internal video is bound to have a dose of propaganda. It’s not entirely even that drivers are to blame; our infrastructure puts cyclists at risk as does the human limitation of only having two eyes.
But I don't. I don't care about 30k deaths a year if I'm killed by a floating point exception or an image reconnaissance glitch making my car think the truck in front of me is part of the sky.
If you die from a car crash it doesn't matter if it was from a drunk driver or an ai glitch. What matters is which is more likely- and humans are assholes. It will be orders of magnitude more likely to die by a human's hand than a random glitch.
> "But I don't"
I'm glad. Crashes still happen even when 1 party practices defensive driving techniques. Driving sucks.
At what threshold should one be willing to bet their lives in this probability every time they drive?
Right now we are speculating what the odds a self driving car has to make a mistake. But there aren’t any truly self driving car out there. So how do you determine the actual odds? If you replaced all the cars with self driving cars how many accidents would we have?
As much as I dislike the term "accident" when talking about car crashes (because, to me, the implication of the word is no one has to take responsibility), sometimes things just happen, because we are imperfect beings with imperfect nervous systems and imperfect perceptions and imperfect reaction times.
Self-driving cars will be better at a lot of things, but, yes, possibly worse at others. They have the potential to eliminate many causes of crashes, but might add a few new ones.
When you're on a plane, you're trusting not only the pilots, but a ton of complex avionics software. Why is that ok, while trusting self-driving isn't? I get that the two tasks are very different, and self-driving will require more sophisticated, nuanced software, but in both cases you're turning your safety over to a computer. That didn't work so well with the 737-MAX, but no one is talking about scrapping modern aviation because a bunch of people died due to bad software decisions.
The problem is the illusion of control. People think that driving their own car means they're in control of nearly every possible outcome, but in reality, they're not. Plenty of things can happen in a car that are out of the driver's control, even without another vehicle involved.
Another part of it is that people (Americans especially) can be excessively individualistic. Many people will balk at a solution that will result in (just making up numbers here) 25% fewer deaths if it means they personally will have a 0.001% greater chance of dying. Frankly, I find that mindset really worrying in a society, even if it can be understandable.
(Somewhat relatedly, I recall an episode of Star Trek TNG where one possible solution to the problem du jour was to give the computer full control over propulsion in order to save the ship. And we're talking about a futuristic computer that could probably flawlessly simultaneously self-drive every car currently on Earth without breaking a sweat. But in the end, blatantly pandering to our "human control is always superior" biases, the computer was found to be not good enough, and humans saved the day. Even more telling, I believe it was Captain Picard who took manual control; they didn't even have Data, the android, do it!)
The outcomes of those choices are known and have causes which are preventable; they are by definition not accidental in nature.
I know it's not intentional but words matter. Crash is a better word 99% of the time than "accident".
This post addresses "The Semantics of Intention":
https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol...
excerpt:
Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in?
UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths.
Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%.
"The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk."
According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building."
City officials have stated clearly that L.A.'s mission to eliminate traffic deaths is informed by the fact that "underserved communities are disproportionately killed in traffic crashes." But Yi argues that the historic neglect of those communities can be viewed as intentional.
"To take that away, I think, is really not looking at some of the most disinvested communities and what they're going through," he said. "To put it squarely on the shoulders of drivers and say it's their fault and they're the ones who should be moderating behavior is overlooking the situation altogether."
