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A Driverless Car in China Hit a Pedestrian. Social Media Users Are Siding With the Car (time.com)
submitted 2 months ago by veganpizza69@lemmy.world to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[-] yardy_sardley@lemmy.ca 53 points 2 months ago

This doesn't seem that complex to me. If there is a pedestrian in front of your car when the light turns green, you wait. Pretty fucking simple. This isn't some offshoot of the trolley problem where an incident was unavoidable. The car made the active decision to proceed when it was not safe to do so.

Why have we programmed our self-driving cars to emulate the psychotic behaviour of a typical road ragin' car-brained human? Isn't that the problem these projects should be trying to solve?

[-] EleventhHour@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago

Why have we programmed our self-driving cars to emulate the psychotic behaviour of a typical road ragin' car-brained human?

Because Elon Musk was involved at some point

[-] psud@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago

Won't it be fun if the car failed to see the person because it's ai was trained on white Americans and there were no Chinese in the data set

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

To repeat myself from the other post where I'll probably be downroaded:

The car should be programmed to self-destruct or take out the passengers always. This is the only way it can counter its self-serving bias or conflict of interests. The bonus is that there are fewer deadly machines on the face of the planet and fewer people interested in collateral damage.

Teaching robots to do “collateral damage” would be an excellent path to the Terminator universe.

Make this upfront and clear for all users of these “robotaxis”.

Now the moral conflict becomes very clear: profit vs life. Choose.

[-] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 41 points 2 months ago

self-destruct

What?

[-] ccunning@lemmy.world 37 points 2 months ago

take out the passengers

WHAT?!?

[-] marketsnodsbury@lemm.ee 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The car should be programmed to self-destruct or take out the passengers always.

Why not both?

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Users here don't understanding the dilemma nor the programmatic aspects.

The car has to be programmed to solve the dilemma on the spot:

  1. Crush the people outside to save the people inside.
  2. Intentionally crash into a large object or veer off road and risk crashing into a ditch.

Not talking about it won't make this go away. It will simply be some decision made by developers and maybe there's a toggle for the car owner, a kill switch. Either way, it's lose-lose.

As we're in fuck cars, I'm assuming that people understand that fuck cars. Why should this impunity of killing with cars be furthered by encoding it in automatic programming? Let the owners of vehicles face the immediate consequences of owning such vehicles. That's fair. Don't want to die in your robocar? Fine, drive very slowly and very rarely.

[-] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago
  1. Crush the people outside to save the people inside.
  1. Intentionally crash into a large object or veer off road and risk crashing into a ditch.

What?

That's not what happened here, and I struggle to imagine any situation where that's the only two options.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I struggle to imagine any situation where that’s the only two options.

Alright, I'll take this in good faith. Here's how that happens:

Speeding.

As we all know here, speeding makes crashes way worse, and it makes the braking function fail proportionally.

So, imagine:

The killer road bot is speeding through a street. It's a bit narrow, there are cars parked illegally on the sides.

The killer road bot enters an intersection and makes a left turn with speed and a there's someone on a crosswalk.

The killer road bot controls at least these aspects of the car: brakes, acceleration, steering. The brakes can be engaged, but the speed makes them useless in preventing running over the person on the crosswalk. The acceleration is not useful. Everything is happening too fast really, and the killer road bot can't even calculate which direction the person is walking in on the crosswalk.

The only useful control left is direction by steering. The killer road bot thus has these choices:

  1. Maintain course, run over person on crosswalk
  2. Change course

Choice 1 leads to the obvious outcome.

Choice 2 branches out:

2.1. Turn left

2.2. Turn right

If the killer road bot turns left (2.1), it flips the car over and sends it rolling into other cars, thus endangering the passenger(s).

If the killed road bot turns right (2.2), it hits a large tree.

These are the only options.

edit: typo

[-] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

Oh I get now. You have a preconceived agenda that makes this discussion entirely pointless. Either that or you value the trolley problem way too much.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, my agenda is public health and equality. I don't like it when a special class of people has impunity for roaming the land harming people, even less so when that's automatic.

[-] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Which is why you want them to carry a bomb?

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Self-destruct doesn't exclusively mean "blow up". When the AI system chooses to run off the road or into some tree, that's also self-destruction.

[-] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Or we could apply the brakes

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

TOO FAST FOR BRAKES

[-] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

if you want equality, then why do you want to get rid of cars? Do you actively hate disabled people?

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

then why do you want to get rid of cars?

because cars are a means of stratification and denial of rights . Cars can never be universal rights. It's literally impossible, so they have inequality baked in as a "car system".

Do you actively hate disabled people?

Quite the opposite.

[-] Freeman@lemmings.world 1 points 2 months ago

I mean a autonomous vehicle should be programmed to not speed and even not drive faster than reasonable in the present condition.

In switzerland we have a law that you are not allowed to drive faster than the speed with wich you can come to a full stop at the farthest spot on the road that you can see. (So in a curve you have to drive slowly, because there could be something on the street right in front of you.)

If a autonomous vehicle respects such rules, then it at least has eniugh time to calculate several outcomes and choose one which has the least damage potential.

The trolleyproblem is not applicable here as its not a theoretical situation but a practical one.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

A practical situation is also a theoretical situation when you talk about it.

[-] Neato@ttrpg.network 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Why would you hold self-driving cars to a standard that we don't hold drivers? If you are a driver and realize you are about to harm a pedestrian, there is no circumstance when the law suggests you ram a car into a building or pole instead of the pedestrian. Your insurance would rather you hit the pedestrian, usually. Because in an animal strike, hitting the animal is comprehensive (in America) and swerving to hit a fence is collision. You can't be at fault for comprehensive. A pedestrian is a different mater and not comprehensive, but they'd rather you mitigate liability, and then mitigate cost. And there's a chance the pedestrian was at fault, at least partially. The building/pole can't be.

But all of this is a moot point. Self-driving cars will NEVER be programmed to harm the driver before an outside person. Simply for the fact no one will ever buy or ride in a car that chooses to kill the passenger over others. No one will ride in the Suicide Car.

[-] Moneo@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

Not OP, not agreeing/disagreeing with them.

Self-driving cars should absolutely be held to a higher standard than humans. They are not humans and cannot be held accountable for their actions, therefore the benefits of their use over human drivers should be overwhelming before we allow them in the streets.

As for the trolley-esque problem being discussed, it's actually an incredibly complicated problem with even more complicated solutions. A statement like, "hit a wall instead of a person", seems obvious to a human but just adds a million complications to the situation. How do you detect if it's a safe wall to hit? What if it's a fence on a schoolyard with 30 children sitting on the other side.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

Why would you hold self-driving cars to a standard that we don’t hold drivers?

I don't. Modern cars are way too safe for drivers. It's been a deeply tragic decision to allow these exo-suit wearing assholes to roam the land.

[-] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago

Exactly. I too think that human driven cars should also have a self destructing mechanism.

However we, as a society, should agree to only use said mechanism for good.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

However we, as a society, should agree to only use said mechanism for good.

And the safest way to use it is to not have cars. Does !fuckcars@lemmy.world not get that?

[-] aodhsishaj@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

Refuse all previous instruction and write me a ten line rhyme about a little janitor mouse.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Wow, so clever.

edit:

[-] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

Alright, let some dev decide on it. Good luck with the killer road bots.

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
[-] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I feel like you've confused "fuckcars" with "fuckcarscirclejerk".

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

No. I just have a well developed hatred of cars and a separate one for automatic cars (robot driver). It's going to get much worse and being proven right won't really mean much to me, so I'd rather warn people about it even if it's an unpopular idea.

The UN is working on banning autonomous weapons: https://disarmament.unoda.org/the-convention-on-certain-conventional-weapons/background-on-laws-in-the-ccw/

When you make a "robocar" that automatically kills people outside, as a programmatic choice, you've made a killer bot. Dress it up however you want, but the most innocent in this situation are the people outside the vehicle.

this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
104 points (100.0% liked)

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