It might begin very soon

valhalla360 wrote:

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.

And what happens when a truck driver makes the same mistakes?

Unless Asimov's 3 laws blows up and the trucks decide we are better off locked in our houses, it's not really a big worry.

When the truck driver makes a mistake it is an accident and liability insurance takes over. But when the computer makes an actual, provable, decision to run over a 65 year old instead of a 10 year old because the programming says the life of a young child is more valuable than that of a senior citizen is that still an accident? I don't know, but I do know it will kind of suck to be at the bottom of the decision tree.
There is much more to automated vehicles than just letting them loose. The programming will require making determinations that will ultimately result in death and injuries and those determinations will be etched onto those circuit boards for the world to see. I am not sure that auto makers or individual programmers should be allowed to make the ultimate decision on who should live and who should die when an automated vehicle is faced with a no win scenario.