Comment Re:Car driver ethics: What do I hit? (Score 1) 800
The whole assumption that we should be discussing this for autonomous cars is a bit bizarre. There are millions and millions of cars driven by people, so we should discuss for them first.
As the summary says, you typically don't have time as a human to make a conscious rational decision about what to hit in a collision. In contrast, an autonomous car can do a lot of processing in a tenth of a second.
And the article is a bit stupid because it forgets a few things: One, a crash with a bigger car is worse _for me_
Not necessarily. A larger car can have bigger crumple zones. If its crumple zones are twice the size of the small car, then the acceleration that you'll experience in the collision is a lot less and so there's a greater chance everyone will survive (assuming that the relative impact speeds will be the same).
Second, it's unlikely that two other drivers made mistakes simultaneously, so it would make a lot more sense to crash into the car whose driver caused the problem
That contradicts your first point. Are you using your car as a weapon to punish the guilty driver, or are you using it as a means of ensuring your survival? It's quite likely that it would be better to swerve into a car travelling in the same direction as you that hasn't made any errors to avoid hitting an oncoming vehicle that is doing something stupid (like being on the wrong side of the road). The relative velocity of the impact will be considerably less.