Comment Re:What about Google driverless car? (Score 5, Interesting) 603
It's so interesting to see people's reaction to the whole driver-less car thing. It's incredible to see the kind of ethical thought-experiment that must necessarily go through everyone's mind when they come to this conclusion: How many lives must be saved before I will tolerate someone being brutally slain by a malfunctioning computer?
Every day, children are run down by drivers who are not paying attention, tired, drunk, or just plain don't have time to react. Since a driver-less car is incapable of being drunk, tired, or distracted, then it's a safe bet that they'll be much better at avoiding those accidents that can be avoided. But the reality is that the latter scenario (no time to react) would still lead to the deaths of many children (and others!).
At what point does it become "worth it"? When the driver-less car causes 1/10th as many fatalities? 1/100th? 1/1,000th? How many human deaths must be prevented by letting computers drive cars before we're willing to accept 1 single death by those same computers?
It's a real-life example of the "Trolley Problem"