Given a choice, I think autonomous cars at some point WILL be programmed with such a choice. For example, hitting an elderly person in order to avoid hitting a small child.

Congratulations. Your product just injured Senator Somebody in order to avoid hitting a Betsy-wetsy doll.

Senator Somebody has filed "lawsuit" against your company. It is super-effective. All your assets are belong to him.

It doesn't have to identify all the objects in the area, it simply has to not hit them.

Which is an order of magnitude EASIER TO PROGRAM.

And computers can recognize an obstacle and brake faster than a person can.

And that is why autonomous cars will NEVER be programmed with a "choice" to hit person X in order to avoid hitting person A.

So the premise of TFA is flawed.

I wonder whether your insurance company would demand to know how you have set your car, and adjust your rates accordingly?

That does not matter because it won't be an option.

That is because "A.I." cars will never exist.

They will not exist because they will have to start out as less-than-100%-perfect than TFA requires. And that imperfection will lead to mistakes.

Those mistakes will lead to lawsuits. You were injured when a vehicle manufactured by "Artificially Intelligent Motors, inc (AIM, inc)" hit you by "choice". That "choice" was programmed into that vehicle at the demand of "AIM, inc" management.

So no. No company would take that risk. And anyone stupid enough to try would not write perfect code and would be sued out of existence after their first patch.

From TFA:

Do you remember that day when you lost your mind? You aimed your car at five random people down the road.

WTF?!? That makes no sense.

Thankfully, your autonomous car saved their lives by grabbing the wheel from you and swerving to the right.

Again, WTF?!? Who would design a machine that would take control away from a person TO HIT AN OBSTACLE? That's a mess of legal responsibility.

This scene, of course, is based on the infamous "trolley problem" that many folks are now talking about in AI ethics.

No. No they are not. The only "many folks" who are talking about it are people who have no concept of what it takes to program a car.

Or legal liability.

Itâ(TM)s a plausible scene, since even cars today have crash-avoidance features: some can brake by themselves to avoid collisions, and others can change lanes too.

No, it is not "plausible". Not at all. You are speculating on a system that would be able to correctly identify ALL THE OBJECTS IN THE AREA and that is never going to happen.

Wired is being stupid in TFA.

What usually happens there is that you get a job with a lobbying firm or their clients when you leave. There is no direct tit for tat, it is just a generally understood thing. They lobby you, you do what they want. When you leave, they'll pay you very well to then go and continue lobbying the next guy. Extremely shady, but not outright illegal.

This sounds like a straight up bribe, which is illegal, money in exchange for a contract.

Under Debian with KDE, most of my menu items describe what the application does rather than using it's name. So at least at the foundation of a huge number of distros, there is no excuse for relying on the "cute" names application developers have come up with.

This is an example of why Microsoft's software ought not even be considered by a serious professional. It ticks all the boxes. Denial of service without user interaction. Security vulnerability with remote root potential. Workaround requires disclosed remote root potential. Recovery requires hands on the device.

It is only going to get worse.

Windows is my gaming system, from which I browse when I have been gaming (as I just finished a bit ago).

Linux is actually where I do most of my work already.

The chances of us wiping ourselves out before the asteroid arrives is better than the odds of the asteroid wiping us out.

Isn't that Ironic

lmao. Even the IT staff where I work, who are heavily pro-windows, MCSEs and such joke about the *reliability* of MS products. Yes, they complain about the relative complexity of setting up some things in Linux, but as of now, we are down two windows servers, replaced with one Linux server. The overall system utilization is almost twice as much, yet the system runs faster.

Yeah, I know, many will say they were doing something wrong, but they are not. MS just eats more resources and handles applications with problems far less well than Linux. The Linux machine has been running non-stop since it was put together early last year, the windows servers still need to bounce every month (which is better than the 2000s with every night). And before you blame the applications poor design, yeah its poor, but the OS is what needs to protect against that. If it can not then the OS has problems. MS just has more of those types of issues than Linux or BSD do.

You can call this whatever you want. It is just how it is.

Details, details, details. :D