It might begin very soon

wapiticountry wrote:
One of the biggest hurdles to automated driving are ethical decision trees. What will the programming be when the vehicle is faced with multiple bad outcomes? Will it be programmed to protect the vehicle at all costs, keeping it out of the ditch and running into a child instead? Will it be programmed to go the other way and veer into the ditch and miss what it thought was a child, but was actually a bag of trash in the middle of the highway possibly careening out of control and crashing into homes, businesses etc? There is a lot of information available on this problem and it is scary to realize there may actually be computer code that makes the decision to deliberately kill you in an effort to protect someone else.

Agreed, this is the issue that will slow the development and implementation of autonomous vehicles. Computers excel (no pun intended) at processing massive quantities of ones and zeros but still cannot really think abstractly like a human mind. Things like pulling to the right for an emergency vehicle, but in some instances pulling to the left or just stopping makes more sense to help the emergency vehicle get by, following the instructions of a police officer directing traffic at an emergency scene, interpreting lane reductions in a construction zone, those are all things that people are often pretty bad at but impossible for a computer to do. Human nature in general plays a part in the acceptance of automation- for some reason people are relatively tolerant of human error, but completely intolerant of an accident being caused by a failure of technology.