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Kelsey Piper - This is the most important moral question about self-driving cars:

A self-driving car has lost control of its brakes and is heading down the road toward some pedestrians. Which one should it hit — an elderly person or a child?

The study found that almost everyone cares about preserving more lives than fewer, but that people in individualist cultures value this more. It also found that #!$%@? in some countries care more about age, status, and whether pedestrians were crossing against the light. While there are some moral instincts that seem fairly universal, many vary across human societies.

The MIT Media Lab posed questions such as this one: The car is careening towards four pedestrians, crossing the street. You can make it swerve, but this will kill the three passengers. What do you do? Other questions added complications: What if the pedestrians are doctors? What if they are pregnant women? What if they are criminals escaping a bank robbery? What if they are elderly?

How do we estimate whether self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, when we can’t feasibly collect enough data to draw those conclusions? Presuming self-driving cars will continue to get safer after they’ve been released (just like human-driven cars did), what threshold for safety should we require before they’re allowed on the roads? And if self-driving cars are eventually much safer than human drivers, should we ban vehicles without self-driving capabilities?

#publicystyka