[2474]

This reminds me of a survey I had taken. I can't remember the survey publisher but it was related to self-driving vehicles.

You were presented two pictures (e.g. a picture of school kids crossing a crosswalk and the other a picture of an adult male and female walking their dog across a crosswalk). Presumably you had to choose; would you swerve to hit the adults and dog or would you stay course and hit the kids.

I know there is no moral compass for a computer system to determine what it should do in the scenario but I laughed at the quiz because I couldn't believe this is the kind of data that will feed machine-learning algorithms.

It just feels bad.

[lowbloodsugar]

Getting data on an ethical dilemma. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

[2474]

Thanks for mentioning what that dilemma was called.

For those interested here is an interesting article about the Trolley Problem.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/the-trolley-problem-w...

[_ea1k]

I really doubt that the survey was about actually training the cars. It probably has more to do with positioning the marketing messaging around them.

AFAIK, the trolley problem isn't something that the engineers consider to actually be a major problem.

[2474]

Thanks for the insight jsight. I sure hope engineers wouldn't use it.

To be fair, it has been a few years since I took the survey so I can't recall if it mentioned what the data was used for.

I don't know enough about machine-learning and self-driving technology but my one question would be, where do engineers get that kind of data to feed into a system? At some point a scenario like the Trolley Problem is going to happen (near or distant future) and what kind of data is going to be making that decision to swerve or remain on course?