Meaning I have so much spare time, that I have not had time to write a post. It has been a busy and achieving day, but not for blogging. Here is a quickie I've dashed off after reading something today.
Autonomous cars may happen in my and your life time, but I doubt driverless cars will. There is a moral aspect to driverless cars which I had not thought about.
Mercedes, as I read, will have their driverless cars protect the occupants of their car at all costs. Sounds good? You would think so.
But if your Mercedes somehow got out of control, as per Princess Diana, and the options were either hitting a solid object, say a big truck or a wall, or a bus stop full of standing school children, it will take the soft option to protect the occupants of the car and mow down the school children.
This may or may not be true, but it does paint that there is a moral aspect to driverless cars.
Not an aspect I had considered, but you are very right.
ReplyDeleteEC, yes, it is not a direction our brain automatically goes.
DeleteThere is a website out there that demonstrates these moral decisions .. I will have to go and find it now.
ReplyDeletehttp://moralmachine.mit.edu
DeleteThanks Carol. Clearly there is more awareness of this than I thought.
DeleteDid I hear Raf talking about this yesterday morning (on 3LO aka 774) or was it someone else? The conversation was about the 'car' and children darting out into the road.
ReplyDeleteCathy, I missed that but it doesn't surprise me. Yes, Raf is filling in for Faine.
DeleteI don't understand these driverless cars at all. Apparently they are doing trials of them in Milton Keynes. They say they will eliminate driver error and of course we never have a technology failure do we!
ReplyDeleteMarie, it raises a wider point, how much we rely on technology. Much of our car designs now are very heavily reliant on computers, from braking to steering and everything in between.
DeleteI was interested to know why anyone in their right mind would oppose universal healthcare, at least for a nation's children. The answer was that wealthy families should not have to pay higher taxes, in order to provide free health care for poor families.
ReplyDeleteQuite like your automatic car's priorities!
Hels, perhaps poor families is a euphemism for blacks, Latins and recent immigrants. You make a good analogy.
DeleteDriverless cars ?? nothing for me ! I prefer to kill myself personally, lol !
ReplyDeleteLove your work, Gattina.
DeleteI hate the idea of driverless cars. They can be programmed to a point, but but they can't react favourably when unexpected things happen.
ReplyDeleteRiver, and there are so many unpredictable events on the roads every day.
DeleteI think the whole idea is ridiculous Andrew, as for pilotless planes..I don't think so! 😊😊
ReplyDeleteGrace, such things amuse the tech kiddies. I certainly want a pilot up front, even to just monitor what the plane does.
DeleteI think it was 60 minutes a week or two ago featured AI and some of the robots, scientists claimed, could learn from experience. One had fake skin and shaped like a human and it was a little scary. The driverless cars or auto drive cars are only as safe as their software and I wonder if they can be hacked by disgruntled outsiders.
ReplyDeleteStrayer, yes, hacking is a good point. The were using robots for old age nursing care in Japan and the trial ended but the patients became upset when they learnt the would lose their robot friends.
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