Driverless cars and the death algorithm
It's clear that we are entering the age of the driverless car and that if this is allowed to go on we will very soon reduce fatalities on our roads to near zero.
The unknown and unpredictable element in the roads is the human driver, and if he is removed from the equation we could find each car perfectly in sync with the traffic and for the first time, no accidents.
Every car travelling in perfect harmony with every other car. Even in heavy traffic, cars would probably be able to travel much, much faster and all kept safe by the lightning fast response times behind the wheel. No Egos and No Rage.
We must however, accept that with the unpredictability of bad weather conditions and mechanical failure, there will always be some accidents. Even in the most ideal scenarios there will always be the possibility of accidents due to these random factors.
When a car plots all possible trajectories after a blow out, and confirms that there is no possibility of avoiding a collision. All done in fractions of milliseconds. If your car is faced with an inevitable collision, should it simply plough through, and resign itself to the injury or death of both cars, or should it take some kind of evasive plunge into the barriers to allow the oncoming car to survive.
Should it be allowed to minimise the loss of life by effectively committing suicide, taking you down with it.
Both autonomous cars could debate the merits of the lives they are entrusted with and they could choose to sacrifice the aged blue collar worker to save the Nobel Laureate. Or take the path that leads to the least fatalities. All these decisions need to be made in a split second and machines are actually capable of weighing these odds and choosing the path of least death.
The problem is that in doing this it will need to make a moral choice, in placing the value of one life above that of another.
Once again we are faced with having to trust machines to decide "who lives" and "who will die".
Exactly like we did with Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.
M Parak 2015
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