[randomThoughts9]

The government might and probably will change this rule.

I can imagine that after the first couple of accidents where the algorithm decides to kill N pedestrians to save 1 driver, the government could switch to a "utilitarian" point of view - minimize the number of lost lives - and will enforce this by law.

[thaumasiotes]

> the government could switch to a "utilitarian" point of view - minimize the number of lost lives

There's nothing "utilitarian" about this, unless you assume that:

(a) All people value their own lives equally

(b) Nobody places any value on anyone's life but their own.

(Side note: we know that both of those don't even come close to being true.)

Without those assumptions, a utilitarian point of view will show some pretty obvious biases against just killing the fewest people -- among other things, it will try to kill older people rather than younger people, and to kill people with the smallest number of relatives (who would be sad about a death in their family).

[ewindisch]

Right. We had an extensive discussion about this at BarCamp Philly this year. The discussion was on machine ethics and we spoke largely about these scenarios of driverless vehicles.

I made the argument that machine ethics aren't a real thing. Companies will do whatever they can to avoid litigation, then the government will step in with regulations as the closest approximation we'll get to ethical behavior.

[TeMPOraL]

I hope one day people will actually grow to appreciate that viewpoint and care about others too. Personally, I find the concept of a car that would consciously chose to save you at the expense of 5 pedestrians to be morally wrong.