Miriam
You conjecture about ownership needs to be expanded to include the term
'most people'. However, some smart lawyer or judge or supreme court
justice will decided that ownership of such a vehicle is a
'constitutional right' and then the government will undertake a program
of ownership.
Richard
On 8/18/2016 11:31 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
My totally blind husband fantasized about having his own car and driver to
take him wherever he wanted to go. My suspiscion is that most blind people
won't be able to afford these cars when they appear and that someone will
create some sort of regulation to prevent blind people from using them,
unaccompanied.
Miriam
Truthdig
Questions of Morality and Safety Are Steering the Future of Self-Driving
Cars
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/questions_of_morality_and_safety_are_ste
ering_20160817/
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Posted on Aug 17, 2016
By Thor Benson
A prototype of Google's self-driving car, circa 2013. (Roman Boed /
Flickr(https://www.flickr.com/photos/romanboed/9572198632) /
CC-BY(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) )
When drivers head to work or to the store, they subconsciously make hundreds
of decisions related to driving laws and safety: Should they swerve to avoid
an object in the road? Should they speed up to catch a yellow light? With
driverless cars on the way, programmers are charged with figuring out how to
replicate a human's driving logic and anticipate what decisions a car should
make in countless scenarios.
In terms of the morality of programming driverless cars, the biggest
question has to do with what's known as the "trolley problem." This
hypothetical scenario involves a runaway trolley speeding down a track on
which five people are standing, while only one person is in the way on an
adjacent track. Should the car switch tracks in order to kill fewer people?
Should a car's passenger be sacrificed to save several people outside of it?
Driverless cars will have to be programmed to make decisions like this.
"There are two challenges when it comes to programming morality in cases
that pose trade-offs between the lives of different people," Iyad Rahwan, an
associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media
Lab, told Truthdig. "The technical challenge is how to create AI [artificial
intelligence] algorithms that are capable of implementing whatever moral
decision principle we give it," he said. "The other challenge is figuring
out what those moral values are in the first place."
The psychology behind these morality decisions has to be studied, because
the most moral thing to do may not be what's best for the car to do in every
case.
As it stands, researchers have not been able to program cars to flawlessly
figure out the relevant morality problems. "The technology just isn't there
right now," said Michael Clamann, a senior research scientist at Duke
University's Humans and Autonomy Lab. "What I think needs to happen first
is, let's see how much we can design the system so these questions don't
even come up in the first place."
Clamann pointed out that it's considered unacceptable when an industrial
robot kills or injures a human, and the same should be true for driverless
cars.
One major possibility with driverless cars is that lives could be saved by
erasing human error in driving. More than 38,300 people were killed and 4.4
million
injured(http://www.newsweek.com/2015-brought-biggest-us-traffic-death-increa
se-50-years-427759) in car accidents in 2015, and many of those deaths were
attributed to human error. Driverless cars clearly can't be distracted by
texting or anxiety or the many other things that can cause people to make
driving mistakes. Assuming it's operating correctly, the number of deaths
and injuries on the road could be reduced significantly.
"The greatest reason to support driverless cars is their potential to
revolutionize transportation safety," Rahwan said.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and founder of SpaceX, believes human
driving(http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/3/17/8232187/elon-musk-h
uman-drivers-are-dangerous) will one day be outlawed because of the need to
maintain road safety.
"I agree with Elon Musk that we may one day ban people from driving cars,
except in designated spaces," Rahwan said. "Of course, this is difficult for
people to imagine now, and there would definitely be a backlash. But in the
long term, we will get there, because it may potentially save millions of
lives."
People who enjoy driving will likely resist being barred from driving, but
the benefit of fewer people dying on our roads may outweigh those concerns.
That said, situations may arise in which a car has been hacked or simply
isn't operating properly, and so there could be a need to include the option
for a car occupant to take over control.
"Google wants a car that doesn't have a steering wheel or a pedal," Clamann
said. "You could want some kind of override.
"There are going to be situations where the autonomous vehicle is not going
to know what to do," he added. "At some point, we're going to have these
unique circumstances where the human is going to have to take over, and in
those cases, it's going to be a really challenging situation."
But humans of the future may not even know how to drive. Once driverless
cars become ubiquitous, learning to drive may not be seen as necessary. "Are
they going to know what to do in that situation? Are they going to know how
to drive or handle the car?" Clamann asked.
It's still going to be a while before driverless cars are on the road
exclusively. A University of Michigan
study(https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/111735/103187.
pdf?sequen) found that even when driverless cars are the only cars available
for sale, it will take 15 years before they are the only vehicles filling
our streets. Elon Musk has claimed it will only be a couple of
years(https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/02/self-driving-car-el
on-musk-tech-predictions-tesla-google) before autonomous vehicles are ready
for sale, but Clamann believes that estimate may be overly optimistic.
Either way, it seems the mass introduction of these vehicles is not too far
off. Hopefully, the development of safety measures won't be rushed while
companies compete to be the first out of the gates with a fully autonomous
car.
For those still wondering whether driverless cars are a good idea, there's
one more aspect to consider, said Clamann: No more traffic tickets.
"If we get so far with autonomous vehicles that we're doing away with
traffic tickets, that means we're also doing away with a lot of the injuries
and fatalities that we have," he said. "I think that's a pretty fair
trade-off."
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