Someone brought up certain problems that they thought would come along with the driverless car. Most had to do with matters concering the routing of getting from one place to another. The question that caught my attention has to do with moral, ethical or value driven decisions we make as drivers all the time.
With real quality engineering I accept that the car could be capable of making better choices than a human. That, of course is the very basis of the concept of taking the control from humans.
One of the hard choices that humans make is to avoid swerving around an animal that might lead to a head-on crash with an oncoming car occupied with a family. Would the driverless car (the d.r) simply recognize the animal as a living creature but the other car as something inanimate, thereby ignoring its cargo?
Could the d.r. recognize the lesser of two evils if it was presented with such a choice. It might indeed be better to run over one person than a group. How would it know the difference? Could it decide to run into the old man, who is at the end of his life, rather than to run into the child whose life is in its ascendency.
I have never had to make any of the decisions outlined above, but I have had many decisions to make that have avoided accidents. These are decisions that come from anticipation. One of the most outstanding that I have never forgotten was the time when I drove up from behind a mother and her daughter. We were in a one way street. The mother was peddling her bike on ahead of her very young daughter. She had crossed the road from left side to right side and was completely ignoring her daughter. My decision was to hang back until the daughter followed suit. Sure enough, the daughter made her move without looking to see if it were safe, at about the time I would have been overtaking her. A calamity was avoided because of my decision to be cautious.
With so many cyclists using our roads we humans need a lot of help in making better decisions for overtaking whole groups of bikers.
The d.r. will automatically eliminate a lot of stupid, but deadly human errors, but others may be created. Only time, and a lot of thought will tell.
Copyright (c) 2015 Eugene Carmichael
