[ExI] Autonomous car ethics

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Anders
Subject: Re: [ExI] Autonomous car ethics

On 2016-06-25 19:16, Chris Hibbert wrote:
> > Should a self-driving car kill its passengers for the greater good ?
> > for instance, by swerving into a wall to avoid hitting a large 
> > number of pedestrians?...

>...Yup. I often end up having to explain to engineers that they mainly need
to think about this kind of ethics if their safety engineering is too bad.
...
(I am just back from an AI meeting hosted by a big German car manufacturer.
Go figure.) -- Dr Anders Sandberg


Sure, but before we get to the ethics, a more mundane engineering task
remains.

Consider the rule of thumb you may have heard in Driver's Ed in high school:
leave a car length following distance for each ten miles an hour.
However... the stopping distance increases as the square of the velocity.
The traditional advice suggests adding distance linearly.  Hmmm...

OK sure, but no worries: the car in front of you is going about the same
speed you are, so she would be slowing down as you are.  Except... when
there is a pileup or something really bad has happened and the car in front
of you stops instantly.  This is how pileups happen which can involve
hundreds of cars.

So... we look through the car in front of us, and slow when we see up ahead
something bad is happening.  But what if you cannot see through the car in
front?  What if it is a big van or something?  Then if there is a pileup,
you don't see it; if that van slams into that car pile, you run into the
van.

Reason I bring it up: the self-driving cars cannot see through any car.
Every car to the self-driver is a big opaque hulk.  So... the following
distance for every self-driver increases as the square of the velocity, so
it can stop in time if the car ahead of it slams into a big immobile object.

This could create a problem.  On a crowded freeway, if the self-driver
leaves that much space, proles will be constantly diving into it.  So the
self-driver will need to react by slowing down.  This will encourage proles
behind the self-driver to dodge around it and swerve back in ahead, causing
the self-driver to drop back even harder.  Picture that in your mind and
think it over.

spike