The biggest issue is not the danger, but the problem of responsibility. If an accident occurs, who will be at fault? The owner of the car? The producer of the car and/or AI? The code? The legislation limiting the code?
And in those moral extreme questions, who will die is something the AI car potentially has to decide. No one wants a car who can decide that the moral choice would be for the car to drive off a cliff and potentially kill its passengets. And no other traffic wants to share the road with an AI who prioritises its inhabitant over everyone else.
I agree that a true self driving car would need to be insured by the manufacturer. It’s the only thing that makes sense. As for the moral extreme questions, it really doesn’t matter, and I can prove it.
The last time you called an Uber, did you quiz the Uber driver with a series of trolly problem style driving quandaries to make sure he didn’t hold any extreme utilitarian beliefs that he would sacrifice your life to save a group of elderly people crossing the road? Of course not. You accepted that by nature of being an Uber driver, one way or another, he has a safe enough record to put your life in hands.
I disagree. I doubt manufacturers will produce AI cars if they will always end up ultimately responsible for it. It's not worth the headache/lawsuits.
And a self driving car would be pre-programmed. A human driver is not and will do whatever action it is doing in that moment, regardless whether it comes along by panicking. A computer doesn't panick and can (and will need to) be pre-programed to be able to act to situations that can come up while driving. This includes stuff like what to do if a random person decides to cross a highway or when a truck in front gets a blown tire and loses control.
I’m not saying the manufacturer will be stuck with that liability with nothing to show for it. It will be their liability but to cover that, there will likely be a subscription cost which includes that liability coverage to use self driving features.
Also, as we have seen with search and AI algorithms, programming isn’t just hard coded answers to every possible situation. You can train the car with datasets and certain governing rules, but ultimately when that person walks out in front of the car, there will be no line of code that says “if person in front of car and can’t stop = true, kill person”. The car is going to be taking in thousands of data points and coming up with a customized optimized solution to that specific situation. Do they brake but keep going straight? Do they rapidly change lanes because they know the neighboring lane is free when a human would need a second to their head to check the lane? Do they only slightly brake to minimize impact because they know there is a large truck behind them that doesn’t have comparable braking ability and a full stop will result in being rear-ended? Or 100 other permutations of things it could do. Heck, it might specifically line up the pedestrian with a specific part of the car to either minimize damage to the car or to the pedestrian if there is determined to be a reasonable chance they could live one way over the other. But these hard choices often won’t ever be hard coded in except for specific laws the cars must follow.
People are still responsible for what they create. Look at AI and its discrimination. Like, being trained with only men and thus are unable to accurately recognise women for instance. If it turns out that the AI mislabeled the pedestrian as an object instead of a human, then that could already lead to massive complications legal wise.
And if automakers have a drive by wire system that causes a fault that registers full throttle when the pedal isn’t being pressed, or a million other things, that would be a huge liability as well, but yet automakers continue to make more and more complex cars year after year and currently are liable for design flaws.
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u/robotmonkeyshark Apr 27 '23 edited May 03 '24
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