[ExI] Autonomous car ethics

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 8:49 PM, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> My point is that self-driving cars will have to make these decisions, and
> just because buyers want feature X doesn't mean buyers will get feature X.
>

### The solutions to the problem would depend on how the liability for
wrongful death is handled.

I am assuming the deaths of car users and third parties would be valued the
same.

If a political/juridical decision is made to hold the car manufacturer
liable, the manufacturer would only sell cars that kill the minimum number
of people under the chosen performance constraints. The manufacturer
probably would not offer cars guaranteed to protect driver because it would
increase its liability. Of course, the manufacturer might choose to offer
such protective cars at a higher price but this might result in unwanted
publicity. It would be easy for others to accuse the manufacturer of
trading lives for money, or encouraging such trade, a form of taboo
trade-off, and in the emotion-driven world of sales this might tarnish the
brand.

If the owner of the car was liable, using a protective car would increase
the owner's insurance premiums. Here the outcome is hard to predict, given
various opposing social pressures acting in relative privacy (I am assuming
the owner would not be obliged to disclose the loyalties of his car).
Signaling altruism, fear of own death, actual altruistic concern for the
lives of others, financial considerations, all these would be weighed
individually, with diverse outcomes.

It is likely that eventually the loyalties of cars and other robots would
become regulated by statute, which is the common outcome in an aging legal
system. Due to the overall massively lower death risk with robot cars, the
net impact of one or the other solution (death-minimizing vs.
passenger-protecting) would be minuscule.

Rafał
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160625/15aa1290/attachment.html>