Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
(OP)
Design Engineering magazine has an article, Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Is this even a valid concept? An autonomous vehicle should refrain from smashing into stuff. If the vehicle has to decide between hitting a baby carriage or a pair of old people, it probably has been driving too fast for the conditions. If these are autonomous weapons, the discussion is even more complicated.
Is this even a valid concept? An autonomous vehicle should refrain from smashing into stuff. If the vehicle has to decide between hitting a baby carriage or a pair of old people, it probably has been driving too fast for the conditions. If these are autonomous weapons, the discussion is even more complicated.
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JHG





RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Roboti...
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Dik
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Given the usual information available one merely bounces between perceived hazards and hopefully arrive at a least worst option, on average.
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Dik
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
There are lots of situations that are completely outside of the car's control. It, nor you, can drive as if in any instant, there will be a runaway baby carriage, or woman being pushed in front of the car that forces that decision. An excellent example just happened: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/201... Amazing, the bus driver was able to miss hitting a woman who was intentionally pushed toward the oncoming bus, but in any number of other conditions, the woman would have likely died.
But, in general, can human drivers do this problem any better? We're talking a hypothetical case where such a decision has to be made in fractions of a second.
Machines actually have an advantage that humans don't; they can be programmed to sacrifice themselves (Law 3 above) for a human, while a human's self-preservation instinct potentially overrides other options that might avoid that dilemma, or not. There have been a couple of news items where people drowned trying to save someone else, even though they, themselves, weren't swimmers.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Dik
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Dik
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
If you asked me (you didn't.) this IS. A. TERRIBLE. IDEA.
Old people and babies, who are often central to these ethical dilemma word problems, often don't carry modern phones. Whether the ethical word problem is representative of the ethical dilemmas likely to be encountered by an autonomous vehicle is another question entirely..
Either way, you don't want to make vehicle path decisions based on bluetooth connectivity.
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
65% of the world's population uses mobile phones (OK that's not the same as carrying one) and 1.5 billion are sold every year. Wow.
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Dik
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
If the robot is losing control, it at least ought to be able to choose between a Ford and a Chevrolet.
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JHG
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
I cannot see automakers commit to 100% autonomy if they are still poised to be sued by everyone and their uncle ranging from emotional distress (I'm an animal rights activist, and the car ran over the squirrel instead of that person), to hate crimes (I think the car chose to hit Group A and not Group B because there were more people of race/ethnicity X in Group A).
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
choices were, a.o., a mother and a baby, two elder people, a robber, children, ...
your actions were "evaluated" based upon the number of kills, the ethnical background of your victims, whether or not you swerved (obeing trafic regulations, ...)
The purpose was, if I recall correctly, to measure human decision driving factors so they could be implemented in autonomous vehicles.
I slept bad after this test.
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Is that ethical or ethnic?
If you are doing aerobatics at an airshow, there is an understanding that if you lose control, you make sure the plane does not land in the crowd, even if that means not bailing out. If you are driving a car and the brakes fail, you generally have the option of driving into a tree or over a cliff or into a wall, thus (probably) injuring only yourself. It was your car and your brakes.
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JHG
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
That was the intent of that poll, to see how the average driver decided what to do in situations where there wasn't a correct answer, only shades of gray. To me, the guilty (rulebreakers) were always punished before the innocents (rule followers).
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
@ MacGyverS2000, the poll I mentioned included many choices were both were obeing all regulations, so basically you had to choose between a mother with a buggy and two elderly...
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RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
My problem with this is that these ethical emergencies represent a narrow range of circumstances. For example, the RMS Lusitania did not capture the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage. She encountered fog, and she slowed down and arrived two days late. In 1930, RMS Olympic rammed and sunk a lightship off New York City. There were complaints afterwards that Olympic habitually sped through the fog. In between these two events, the captain of RMS Titanic had to make the ethical decision of who got into the lifeboats.
How do Asimov's three laws of robotics address risk? If my robot is flying an airliner, at what point does it refuse to take off, or if flying, head for the nearest airport not affected by the hurricane? There is an economic cost and even physical risk to people arriving at their destinations late.
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JHG
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
My question is why would you program human ethical behaviour into the vehicle when we all know that humans are flawed?
RE: Can autonomous vehicles make moral and ethical decisions?
As corollary, it could imply that any proposal for new deployment (e.g. autonomous vehicle) shall be scrutinized until the nature of the proposal is sufficiently evidenced as a "must have" while satisfying a local optimum (on a single event, the robot shall not be outperformed by a human in any circumstances) and a global optimum (on average superior social and economical benefit for the public).