This is a trought expriment let's suppose at some point in the not so distant future you're barreling down the highway in your self driving car and you find your self boxed in al sides by other cars suddenly a large heavy object falls off the truck in front of you your car can't stop i time to aviod the collision so it needs to make a decision go start and hit the object swerve left into an suv or swerve right into a motorcycle should it prioritize your safety by hitting the motorcycle minimize danger to other by not swerving even if it means hitting the larger object and sacrificing your life or take the middle ground by hitting the suv which has a high pasenger safety rating so what should the self driving car do ? if we were driving that bixed in car in manual mode whichever way we'd react would be understood as just that a reaction not a delibrate decision it would be an instinctual panicked move with no forethrough or malice but if a programmer were to instruct the car to make the same move giving condition it may sense in the future well that look more like premeditated homicide .
Now to be fare self driving cars are predicted to dramatically educe traffic accidents and fatalities by removing human error from the driving equation plus there may be all sorts of other benefits eased road congestion decrease harmful emissions and minimized unproductive and stressful drivin time but accidents can all will still happen and when they do their outcomes may be determined months or years in advance by programmers or policy makers and they'll have some difficult decisions to make it' tempting to offer up general decision making principles like minimize harm but even that quikly leads to morally murky decisions for example let's say we have the same initial set up but now there's a motorcycllist wearing a helment to your left and anothre one without a helmet to your right which one should your robot car crash into if you say the bike with the helmet because she's more likely to survive then aren't you penalizing the responsible motorist if instead you save the biker without the helmet because he's acting irresponsibly then you've gone way beyond the initial design principle about minimizing harm and the robot car is now meting out street justice .
The ethicals considerations get more complicated here in both of our scenarios the underlying design is functioning as a targeting algorithm of sorts in other words it's systematically favoring or discriminating against a certain type of object to crash into and the owners of the target vehicles will suffer the negative consequences of this algorithm through no fault of their own our new technologies are opening up many other novel ethical dilemmas for instance if you had to choose between a car that would always save as many lives as possible in an accident or one that would save you at any cost which would you buy what happens if the car start analyzing and factoring in the passengers of the cars and the particulars of their lives could it be the case that a random decision is still better than a predetermined one designed to minimize harm and who should be making all of these decision anyhow programmers companies governments .
Reality may not play out exaclty like thought experiments buts that's not the point they's designed to isolate and stress test our intuitions on ethics they's designed to isolate and stress test our intuitins on ethics just like science expriments do for the physical world spotting these moral hairpin hurns now will help us maneuver the unfamiliar roads of technology ethics and allow us to cruise confidently and conscientiously into our brave new future .
Early Autonomous Driving Innovations
Autonomous driving has recently taken the world by storm with elon musks roolout of self driving teslas but did you know that autonomous driving has actually been around for over 100 years the foundation of autonomus driving the humble beginnings driving as we know it dates back to 1925 when houdini radio control revealed their radio controlled car that named the the american wonder and and would be seen driving the traffic filled street of new york city the technology featured a transmitting anteena that recevied signals from a remort control handled by someone outside of the car the signals would ignite small electrical motors that would allow the vechicle to move the car could start its own engine change gears and even toot its own horn however the operator of the radio controlled car lost control twice and unfortunately the car ended up crashing shortly after in the streets of milwaukee the car distributor motor showed off anouther radio controlled autonomous vechicle know as the phantom auto in december of 1926 .
The first self driving cars general motors exprimented throughout the 1950s and developed car known as firebirds these were promoted as cars that could allow drivers to relax while they traveled over highways automatically by 1958 they had developed a car that used sensors to detected a current flowing through a wire embedded in the road this current could then be manipulated in order to direct the steering wheel left or right the major amrican electronics company RAC labs was busy inventing at the same time and created a car that worked in a similar way it was directed by impulses comming from a circuit laid into some flooring to streer and RCA labs even created a 400 foot highways strip that they tested theur cars on the two competitors joined forces for a while with general motors stepping in to collabrorate in the test highway they supplied two cars radio recivers audible and visual warning devices and were able to simulate automatic brake control steering and acceleration.
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