Moral Machine

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Yes they will. That's a good thing. Here's why.

Let's say you face some sort of car related ethical dilemma like the ones described above. You have to make a split second decision. A month later you're on trial for manslaughter. You say it was unavoidable but the prosecuting lawyer has a long list of things you "should have known" and "should have taken into consideration".

The prosecuting attorney just spent three weeks reading through his library of law books to make his case. Yet you're expected to consider all of those things without access to a law library and in a split second, not three weeks. The prosecuting attorney has years of law school behind him, which included an ethics class, yet you're expected to know the the things he knows without having a law degree. It takes him several days in court just to explain his long list of things you "should have taken into consideration". Several days to talk about it, yet you're expected to have taken all that into consideration in a split second.

Lawyers are a shifty bunch. If there's some moral principle it took him weeks of research to find, he'll make the jury think it's the most obvious idea that everyone should already know.

Lawyers have the benefit of hindsight. With hindsight they can make what you "should have done" seem like it was extremely obvious, even though at the time it wasn't.

For a self-driving car, the program will only carry out the ethical decisions that the programmers programmed into it. But they don't have to do it in a split second. The same decision you might make in a split second, they spend weeks or months trying to decide before they put it into the program.

Most of the development time is spent working out that stuff before they even right a single line of code. And the devteam also has a team of lawyers they consult with, who can spend weeks reading through books of forgotten law before the scenario plays out in real life.

So the self-driving car would have morality no better than a human. But it would be equivalent to a human who spent weeks or months on the decision before entering it into the program, rather than a human forced to make a split second decision. It was be equivalent to a human with a team of lawyers and thousands of law books, rather than a human forced to make the same decision without such learning and without a chance to consult any lawyers or read any law books.

The self-driving car would have only human knowledge of ethics but in a greatly condensed format with all the hard decisions worked out before it entered production.

Not to mention the program has a perfect model of newtonian physics, faster reaction times, perfect vigilance and without the human impulse for speeding and tailgating.

If one person runs out in front of your car and there's no one else around, obviously you don't want to run him over. This is a very simple ethical decision. But putting it into practice may be difficult with human reaction times. The self-driving car could have a reaction time of a millisecond.

If there's not much time to stop, can you decide if it's better to brake or swerve in a split-second? In a millisecond, the self-driving car could use its model of newtonian physics to work out whether it's better to brake or swerve. Even in low visibility it could figure all this out using infrared cameras or sonar or something.

And before you say the self-driving car might still kill someone, and it might, consider the alternative, which is people driven cars. If it was a choice between having self-driving cars and cars driven by perfect human drivers who never speed and never drive inattentively and never make a single mistake, I'd rather have the human drivers. But in reality people aren't like this. Many people die on the road every year.

So even if the self-driving car might kill someone, it's not like the alternative has a zero chance of killing everyone. In the real world it's not even a chance someone will get run over by a driver, it's a guarantee that tomorrow, someone somewhere in the world will be run over and killed.

I'd rather take a small chance of someone dying than a guarantee.

Yes if your self-driving car crashes and kills you, you'll still be dead but that might happen while you're driving anyway (the fact you're alive to read this means it hasn't happened yet. Yes if your self-driving car runs someone over, you'll still be held accountable but that could happen while you're driving anyway.

Have you ever had a fender bender? Had to pay a gap on your insurance? What if you could reduce the odds of all that happening?

I'm not stepping foot in a self-drive car until I KNOW they took all the bugs out of the technology.

I don't even like using cruise control LOL

I think they will Krafty I know firsthand how much work they put into finding bugs in software. At work the whole seventh floor of a 300 foot wide building is dedicated to finding bugs. That's more than a hundred people working full time and sometimes overtime just to find bugs in java based websites.

No one's life is dependant on a website. The more someone's life depends on something, the more they'll test it. For example, NASA spends about 80% of it's development costs on testing.

For a more familiar example, have you flown on a plane in recent years? If you have then your life was dependant on a computer program. Yes, if the autopilot fails the pilot and co-pilot will take over but the modern airline cockpit has eliminated the flight engineer's station.

So while the pilot and co-pilot can still fly the plane, all the flight systems required to keep the plane in the air, formerly handled by the flight engineer are not dealt with by a computer program.

You can bet they spent a lot of time debugging that program because if the engines fail or the fuel mix is wrong or the hydraulics fail, there won't be anything for the pilot to work with.

Also remember that when you're driving, your life may depend on computer controlled traffic lights.

Characterizing a decision, choice or state flow as moral is imposing a meaning. A machine has not notion of morality. All it does is state transformations determined by its construction. The only moral decisions machines make are decisions defined as moral by the programmers of the machine.

Well it appears I hate the elderly. http://moralmachine.mit.edu/results/-17044553

I'm not imposing a meaning, I'm describing what kind of decision I'm talking about. A decision is a decision, and computers can be programmed to make decisions. My point is to say that whether or not the decision is of moral consequence, a computer could be programmed to make that decision. Yes, these morals will be our own, but the fact remains that a machine, whether it has its own intentions or not, can do this. I'm simply saying it is totally possible and extremely likely that this will be happening in the future.

Cool test.

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/results/1218332209

My results could imply that I value female lives over male lives. However, separate factors are what led to me saving more females.