
Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas - okket
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/22/self-driving-cars-moral-dilemmas
======
tim333
The trolley problem is unlikely to come up. If a car has one pedestrian in the
lane in front of it and two in the other it will probably just hit the brakes
and I guess the pedestrian can jump out of the way if he's nimble.

There are moral dilemmas that do come up though. Should Tesla be live with
it's autopilot if it may be more dangerous than human driving at the moment
but where the research value will save lives in the future, for example.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
We need some law that makes it ok for it to do that. I'd suggest that any
autopilot should attempt to stay on the road surface or shoulder only, to
eliminate exotic cases of "if it had only driven into the ditch!" trolly-car
issues.

------
dstainer
May be naive but wouldn't the emergence of automated vehicles push cities to
change their design to eliminate the normal case where pedestrians and
vehicles share any road at all?

It wouldn't happen overnight, but I would think that ultimately you would want
to get pedestrians out of the way to improve efficiency of travel. I dunno

~~~
mousa
I don't see why automated vehicles would cause this redesign to happen when
human drivers haven't.

~~~
zyxley
If anything, it seems like they would make sharing the road more common,
because a reasonably reliable self-driving car would be safer around impromptu
crosswalks and the like than many human drivers.

