
Barak Obama wants to solve robocar "Trolley Problems" - Symmetry
http://ideas.4brad.com/yikes-even-barak-obama-wants-solve-robocar-trolley-problems-now-0
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shpx
I'll say it again, this "discussion" is just bike shedding. [0]

As an example, not everyone can have an opinion on how much of a role deep
learning should/will play in a self driving car, of what types of deep
learning models we should try, or how we should interface between neral nets
and regular code.

But everyone and their mother can talk about trolley problems, it's a mind
virus that's existed for 50 years. You tell me more about yourself than about
self driving cars.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality)

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bradtemp
Yes, this is the point of the article

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darkerside
The "right" answer to the question as posed does seem to be for the car not to
deviate from its intended lane and right of way. However, the likely
conclusion of this technology is streets that are totally unsafe for any kind
of illegal crossing. As acceptable mortality thresholds are established, speed
limits on automated cars are certain to increase, considering the unchecked
thirst for convenience by owners of any technology. Once we have cars whizzing
down the road at high speed, with an established social understanding that
cars do not cede right of way, streets will essentially become off limits.
Compare this to 100 years ago when playing outside and in the street was
commonplace and relatively risk free. I'm not a Luddite, but is the freedom
we're giving up over our world worth the convenience of automated driving?

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GFK_of_xmaspast
100 years ago people drove a lot slower.

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kmill
Back when city streets were still contested between pedestrians and
automobiles, there were many cases of cars going in excess of 40mph on city
streets. Due to the many fatalities, people pushed for requiring governors to
keep cars from exceeding 30mph, to the resistance of automobile owners. The
details of this were in some article posted to HN in the last few years. The
result was, instead of governors, making "jaywalking" a crime.

An interesting thing is that NYC has a speed limit of 25mph now.

~~~
huehehue
Good luck getting past 25mph in some parts of the city though. Traffic,
pedestrians/jaywalkers, hazards, and stop lights every other block act as a
more natural governor.

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yk
I think this is one of the situations were the intuition of non-engineers
should simply be ignored. If we go with the numbers from the article, one
fatal accident per 2 million hours driven, and if we assume that this is in
the ballpark of trolley problem situation, then we need for the trolley
problem detector something like six-nines reliability so that the false
positives are just in the same ball park as the true positives. And make no
mistake, false positives means that the automatic car decides to kill the
group of children even though it could just drive safely. So the best code is
the empty line, it executes reliable and predictable, does not introduce bugs
and is really fast.

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johngalt
Exactly, this is the most navel gazing fake moral dilemma. We already know
that we could reduce fatalities on the road by reducing speeds and using
different types of intersections. We choose to do neither with regularity.
Because they would cost time and/or money.

Objectively autonomous vehicles are such a massively huge improvement in our
capabilities that we should be taking _larger_ risks than we are currently. We
shouldn't be hand wringing about these constructed 'what ifs'. The entirety of
our efforts should be focused on pushing the envelope on
implementation/execution.

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belzebub
The answer is simple, find a way to do a quick credit check on the possible
targets, which ever one has less ability to sue, run them over!

~~~
sosuke
Reminds me of some article I read where drivers in China would go for a "kill"
hit.

"Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit."
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html)

Ugh, I started skimming the article again and I can't read it. Just gruesome.

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mc32
The perverse incentive was, if I recall correctly, if you maim someone you're
responsible for their wellbeing for life. If they are killed, it's a
manageable lump sum.

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ams6110
The author is likely right. Self-driving cars will stay in their right of way
at all times, and do their best to avoid collisions within that constraint.
Departing from the legal right of way to "avoid" a collision will likely be a
no-win for liability reasons.

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duaneb
> You might get criticized for running over jaywalkers when you could have
> veered onto the sidewalk, but the former won’t be punished by the law and
> the latter can be. If people don’t like the law, they should change the law.

Yeesh, the author is asking for a bloodbath. Have you ever been to a city?
Jaywalking is just how the world works, and they have de facto ROW. The law is
almost entirely irrelevant and is exclusively used to profile minorities.

If we start with the law we start with a broken system. It might allow you to
pass the blame in court, but it's not going to save your ass when your shiny
car logo has pedestrian blood on it from sprinting through times square.

While this gets way too much attention, there is still some difference between
the opportunities, and the law is the last place to look for sanity or
rationality.

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rosser
Jaywalking is not "just how the world works".

Yes it happens, in some places, so don't try to argue that particular
strawman. To extrapolate from that to "Welp!", however, is just sloppy
thinking.

EDIT: example: Several years ago a co-worker was driving home, and a woman
jaywalked in front of his Escalade (on a street with a posted 40mph speed
limit). He watched her head bounce off his hood and she flew like 20-30 feet
to land in a heap in the street.

He called 911, and, being like 2 blocks from the nearest fire station, they
had a bus and a cruiser on-scene in a few minutes. The responding officer took
his statement, and then said something like, "Thank you, sir. Now I'm going to
go write her a ticket."

He asked, "Do you have to?"

The officer paused, looked him in the eye, and said, "Sir, you _want_ me to
issue her this ticket."

This was in a city of (at the time) maybe 100,000 people, in a flyover state.
Very much the kind of place you'd expect jaywalking just to be the norm.

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etrevino
> "Sir, you want me to issue her this ticket."

I didn't even think about this, but it probably saved the driver thousands
down the proverbial road. Still, for the poor woman it was probably insult to
injury.

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karmicthreat
The case for this is actually similar to how damage from vaccines are
litigated. Vaccines are objectively a good thing for society. Yet, they do
cause harm to a small number of people. So we have the National Vaccine Injury
Compensation Program to handle these claims. These laws also shield the
manufacturers from most liability. Now gross negligence isn't going to be
covered by this and I'm sure lawyers can find other instances.

This seems like a good concept for self driving vehicles if removing humans
makes injuries orders of magnitude less. It won't be perfect, so in those
cases a national program for compensation and liability shielding makes sense.
Then the technology and be quickly deployed and improved.

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stale2002
That's overcomplicating things.

Accidents and lawsuits will be handled and paid for by the same people that
handle them right now.

They will be handled by the insurance companies.

Except now, the insurance companies will be paying an order of magnitude less
money due to the safety increase.

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neom
I'm curious what we do when we "solve" (hmmm...) the trolley problem and
continue to build autonomous machines that take this "problem" into account,
however, a machine malfunctions, or is placed in a situation that it could not
execute the prescribed outcome for the problem (if that makes sense). Where
then do we place the blame?

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coderzach
> By and large the law already has an answer

Not really, morality =/= legality. I don't want legal self driving cars, I
want moral ones. Laws will always be an imperfect implementation of morality.
Do self driving cars have to respect the laws of countries that don't respect
the rights of minority groups? Should self driving cars in Saudi Arabia prefer
to hit women?

Legality isn't an escape hatch that absolves you of the moral implications of
your actions.

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M_Grey
It isn't, but we're talking about people who are thoughtless and casual in the
defense of their own life and health, and choose to jaywalk, not women, or
minority groups of some kind. Morally speaking, I find it difficult to fall on
the side of people who place the burden of keeping them alive on society at
large, out of sheer carelessness.

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the
sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out
automatically and without pity.” -Heinlein

~~~
mindslight
You're actually talking about people who _do_ casually defend their own life
and health, by choosing to _walk_.

In actual urban cities (eg NYC, Chicago, Boston), pedestrians are quite
capable of informally navigating with cars, crossing at any point of a street
rather than waiting for some preposterous "walk light" (and possibly even
being expected to push a filthy button to activate it!?). Streets are a
_shared_ resource for many types of users, so it is certainly not a given that
a single type of traffic should be given utmost blind priority. That kind of
thing is an explicit policy decision, and is currently reserved for the _few_
"controlled access" highways.

I think it will be quite unfortunate if the west coast style of "oblivious"
driving becomes calcified as code and exported to the rest of the world. Self-
driving cars actually represent an opportunity to roll back this fallacious
attitude that "streets are for cars", as a self-driving car is much more
attentive and will not tire of being vigilant. For example, if your automatic
car cannot gauge whether a crossing pedestrian intents to cross in front of or
behind it and make a slight speed adjustment (as said pedestrian has already
done, and as current human drivers are expected to do), then it _deserves_ to
come to a quick stop and wait there like an idiot until you upgrade it to
competency.

In line with the original article, I think this whole subject is an utter red
herring and an amazing illustration of how the media can manufacture its own
concern over a topic just to fill pages. The thought experiment is
specifically called the "trolley problem" because trolleys run on discrete
tracks and stop slowly. In the real world braking and turning have basically
the same avoidance distance, accelerating does not save you from accidents,
and people are never expected to drive off cliffs to avoid pedestrians.

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M_Grey
The reality, as someone who has lived in all three of those cities, is that
pedestrians are adept at making cars navigate them, because they can. It's not
that crosswalks (which are ubiquitous in those cities) are somehow burdensome,
they just have shit to do and know that drivers don't want to hit them.

These are the same people who just walk into the street without even looking,
while on their cell phones.

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mindslight
> _These are the same people who just walk into the street without even
> looking, while on their cell phones._

Obviously the bad actors are going to stand out to you. There are many more
people who are attentive when they informally cross, but they blend into
traffic and are forgotten about.

I don't know what to do about the recent phenomenon of people spaced out on
their phones, but I'm pretty sure changing traffic laws so drivers can
explicitly hit them is not a good answer.

(crosswalks aren't burdensome, but the idea that pedestrians should only ever
cross in them is, by construction. Why should a pedestrian be made to walk an
extra block to simply cross a regular ubiquitous street, when they do not
depend on the abstraction that would necessitate it? The "highway revolts"
took place for good reason, and changing every street into a controlled access
road would essentially resume that damage)

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M_Grey
Why should they be made to walk an extra block? So that they don't die.

A fact that should be increasingly relevant as the reigns are slowly handed
over to computers.

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mindslight
The need to "not die" is a result of a deliberate policy choice, which you're
obscuring by making it seem like the pedestrian is the only one choosing.

If we're talking about metaphorical "reigns" meaning control of society, then
we definitely should _not_ be handing these over to computers. The goal should
be for computers to be responsible to people [0], rather than people being
controlled by computers. Otherwise, we are abdicating are own right to exist.

[0] True independent AI would function as its own agent. But I would
categorize that as a new "person".

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M_Grey
A deliberate policy choice of... allowing cars on roads? Before that it was
horse drawn carriages and people on horseback running people down. I'm not
clear on the pure policy choice you're referencing.

The rest of your post is a complete tangent.

~~~
mindslight
The policy choice you seem to be advocating is that cars should have complete
right of way, which is decidedly not the present condition.

My "tangent" directly addressed something you said.

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M_Grey
>The need to "not die" is a result of a deliberate policy choice...

Your earlier statement. Now you're saying that policy (the one you describe as
a construction designed to be burdensome earlier) is one you feel I've
implied? I've done no such thing. You're the one claiming that the current
system is burdensome, don't try to wriggle out of that.

Your tangent meanwhile did not directly address something I said, it addressed
an extension of what I said pertaining to vehicles, and expanded it to a
society-wide issue. So again... tangent.

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rabboRubble
I participated in a trolley problem test (probably found a link to the test
here) a few months back. The point of the test was to determine my ethical
biases about how many and which people to kill based on age, sex, fitness,
etc.

I found the results meaningless because I don't gauge which action to take
based on classifications like age, sex, or societal function. I gauge my
actions on total number of lives taken, and which move was the least asshole
move to take. If I'm in a certain lane, and I'm guaranteed to kill 3 people in
either lane, I stay in my assigned lane because it's an asshole move to switch
lanes just because I think [blank] about the people in front of my car. I stay
in my lane, kill the same number of people, and deal with the consequences.

Plus driving at any speed, I don't think I can see category well enough to
make decisions, except perhaps for babies in buggies that are so visually
different. Even then the buggy cart could be filled with junk. So the least
asshole move is to stay in my assigned lane and kill the people in front of
me. Although I might try to avoid a baby in a buggy / obvious small child
because that is one distinction I'd be guaranteed to see at most speeds.

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klodolph
I feel like there's a [sic] missing from the title there.

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bradtemp
Typo fixed, sorry

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Cenk
Barak?

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bambax
First and foremost, robocars need to protect their occupants, because if they
don't and can decide to self destruct in order to "save" some stranger whose
life is "more valuable" according to some algorithm, nobody will ever ride in
one, and society will be worse off as a result.

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bambax
While reading the Obama interview in Wired I come across this:

> _ITO: When we did the car trolley problem, we found that most people liked
> the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many
> people. They also said they would never buy a self-driving car. [Laughs.]_

They shouldn't laugh, because that's the problem right there. If you think
your car can decide to "sacrifice" you under some circumstances, then you will
not get into it, and the whole self-driving system doesn't even start.

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joeblau
This two year old solved it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4)

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myf01d
The boss wants, the slaves do, the boss takes the credit & profit. A forever
loop that may end only if you become the boss.

