An Autonomous Car Might Decide You Should Die – But that prospect isn’t as scary as it sounds
The “trolley problem” is an old, familiar thought experiment in ethics. Lately it has been enjoying a rather outlandish level of exposure. Much of the credit goes to journalists applying the problem to autonomous cars. Those discussions end up feeling remote and theoretical. Yet by revising the problem just slightly, it can contribute to both a realistic and urgent debate on self-driving cars… which is precisely what I’m fixin’ to do in this article.
Great read, written by Mitch Turck on medium. The trolley problem was first introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967:
Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found guilty for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose aeroplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots the mob have five hostages, so that in both examples the exchange is supposed to be one man’s life for the lives of five.
A really good read.
And yes, a picture of Lisbon( I think?). I miss Lisbon!
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