And then blind people will discover that the software is inaccessible and
sue Google to make it accessible to the visually impaired.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Driscoll
Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 4:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Questions of Morality and Safety Are Steering
the Future of Self-Driving Cars
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 andpeople?
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_a
re_ste
ering_20160817/
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Email 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
Should a car's passenger be sacrificed to save several people outside ofit?
Driverless cars will have to be programmed to make decisions like this.first place."
"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
significantly.
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
concerns.
"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
That said, situations may arise in which a car has been hacked orsituation."
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
study(https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/111735/103187.
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
pdf?sequen) found that even when driverless cars are the only carsoptimistic.
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
tickets.
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
"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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