I've been meaning to ask you about that thread. Ethical discussions like the linked article tend to pop up regularly while researching automated vehicles. Could you see if I'm missing something in understanding your line of reasoning? Using the trolley problem as a way to think about the safety issues surrounding self-driving vehicles is inherently useless; this is because it reduces the complex, real world into a simplified scenario (A or B, kill you or kill me) ; engineers will just try to reduce all risk possible and will try to anticipate situations that the car can't get itselves out of. I think a much more interesting conversation is how much risk we accept from an automated car. For example, the British press is going bananas over a rollercoaster accident last week. Nevermind the fact that rollercoasters are incredibly well-engineered and much, much safer than any other transportation method (and that it was very likely a human error), a lot of people are now much more hesitant to step in to a rollercoaster. Even if a fully automated car is 100 times safer than driving yourself, it will still have accidents and it will still remove power from people. While a super-safe network of automated vehicles is a great goal, the transition towards is won't be silky smooth, I fear.
You're describing the dirty bomb problem. To recap, a dirty bomb is a bunch of radioactive shit put somewhere that it will freak people out. The freakoutitude of most people associated with radioactivity is off-the-hook bad; an excellent example of the possible effects can be found in Brazil. - 93 grams of radiology-grade Cesium 137, stolen by scrap metal thieves - contaminated scrap metal sold to a wholesaler - thief's 6-year-old daughter painted herself up with enough glowing Ce137 to kill her dead within a month - thieves begin to think oh shit maybe we shouldn't have pried out that glowing blue shit we didn't understand - total fatalities: 4 - total cases of radiation sickness treated: 20 - Number of radiation screenings performed: 112,000 I can't find a good estimate of the Goiania costs, but they were scraping topsoil, demolishing buildings, all sorts of oh-shit remediation the likes of which reminds one of anthrax island. It was a major infrastructure clusterfuck and a stupendous effort, wholly outsized when one considers the actual area denial and health impact. And that's because dirty bombs spook the shit out of people. Here's the trick, though - they spook the shit out of people once. Ask any expert and he'll tell you that once people acclimatize to the fundamental danger level, as opposed to the hyperbolic danger level, and people stop caring nearly as much. The first dirty bomb is gonna be hell on the economy. The second one? Not so much. Kiev is just another city. Radiation is just another hazard. People put up with contaminated air, contaminated groundwater, you name it. Cars had a rough time initially. A horse-drawn culture wasn't ready for them. They were spectacles. Fast forward thirty years and they're commonplace. The step between "driven car" and "driverless car" is substantially less than the step between "horse" and "car" and we managed that just fine.
And that is my whole problem with the issue - we're seeing this from the point of view of "the car hits someone". But we're not willing to acknowledge that if the car functions correctly, literally the only way for that car to harm a human is for the human to bring itself in harm's way.