As self-driving cars move from fiction to reality, a philosophical problem has emerged. The classic case of a runaway rail carriage hurtling down tracks towards a group of five oblivious people.
On the first one, the carriage kills five people, and on the other it kills only one person. What do you do? Although the parameters can be adjusted, the problem is essentially the same. What if the five people are all over the age of 80 and the one person is under 20?
You get the idea. So what has this got to do with self driving cars? Let’s replace the runaway rail carriage with a self driving car.
What if, rather than picking between the lives of five people and one person on different roads, you had to pick between the life of the car’s sole occupant, and the lives of five pedestrians? Would you buy a car if you knew it was programmed to swerve into a tree to protect someone who crossed the road without looking?
It found that the majority of people would avoid buying self-driving cars as a result. That, of course, would result in far more deaths in the long run, as the endless deaths at the hands of incapable human drivers would continue.
In all their testing, they have yet to encounter a situation where you have to pick between the baby stroller or the grandmother. Even if they did see a scenario like that, it would mean they had made a mistake a couple of seconds earlier.
Slam on the brakes, stupid!