| Thanks for the detailed reply. I will say first of all that I am an autonomous sceptic. I think it could be useful for some situations but not in all situations. I would say that your first example really exemplifies my point about realistic examples. You start off well but then your point about ethics goes a bit off the rails in my opinion. I struggle to think of how to explain this point but I think it all comes down to "intelligence". Us humans are, for the most part, absolutely terrible in situations like your first example. It's basically impossible to make any kind of rational decision in such a short time frame, we just act instinctively. There is no way we could make any kind of logical or ethical decision we would mostly just slam on the brakes - and possible swerve accidentally depending on what we did with our hands in the stress of the moment. So you are already asking our autonomous technology to make decisions that a human couldn't make in the same situation. Now that is fine as computers can process information much faster than humans, but then the question becomes "how much faster?" Lets face it: your example is asking a computer to process a huge information and then make a complex decision regarding that information in about one second. I'm not convinced that is even possible. Not only that you then start talking about ethics. How on earth is your computer going to work out if someone is a homeless person? In my personal opinion you are asking too much from the computer in too short a time frame. Us humans make cost/benefit decisions regarding safety all the time. No system is going to eliminate all deaths from vehicles; there will always be situations we can't predict. If you start going down the rabbit hole of "let's try to evaluate all risks no matter how improbable" you will never get anywhere because in such a chaotic environment as a busy city centre it is virtually impossible to predict everything that could possibly go wrong. Unless we can create a general AI (which I'm not convinced is possible and even if it were, why would it want to cart us about) then we will never be able to create an autonomous car that can assess unexpected situations in a way that would satisfy human standards. I think the best we can do is to have them operate in more constrained environments where the risks can be reduced, and have humans drive in other more chaotic environments. I'd love to write more but I have to get to work and I don't want to bore you :-) |