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kleinbl00  ·  3517 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Should your robot driver kill you to save a child's life?

It isn't, though. See, you start with the presumption that any autonomous vehicle must be at least as competent as a human driver or else they have no business on the roads. Google data bears this out - where they drive, they're damn good at it.

So then you have to replace the autonomous driver with a human driver and give it a look. So now it's not "you're a passenger in a Google car down a winding mountain road" it's "you're driving down a winding mountain road." In order for thought experiments like this you have to presume that you're driving at an unsafe speed - you're out-driving your brakes - and that you're going to speed up when presented with a tunnel. Which people don't do, by the way. They slow down.

In order to put an autonomous vehicle in a "choose you or choose the kid in the road" scenario you have to put a driven vehicle in a "choose you or choose the kid in the road" scenario. And those are few and far between but there's 100 years of case history behind them anyway so it's not really the thought experiment the pundits want it to be.

Disagree? Go ahead. Rephrase the question. It all comes down to the trolley problem which, lemme tell ya, BNSF has gone well out of its way to render moot through safeguards and best practices. This is the DOT we're talking about - you really think some columnist somewhere has come up with a Sophie's Choice problem that hasn't been ironed out over 100 years on 4 million miles of roads in the US alone?

There are real problems with autonomous vehicles and their implementation. Focusing on this one draws attention away from them.