Self driving car's are said to be a breakthrough in human inventions, people believe that it is the only solution to accidents and road safety, people believe that our road will be filled with self driving cars in the future, however I kind of think differently when it comes to the topic of a car that can drive itself, here are some reasons why.
The infamous ‘trolley problem’ was put to millions of people in a global study, revealing how much ethics diverge across cultures
The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form of the problem is this:
You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track, and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options:
Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
You must also consider that the single person lying on the side track is your only son.
Which is the more ethical option? , you either kill 5 strangers or kill your own son.
This famous problem was given to undergraduate students to test their morals the reason I am saying this now is that an artificial intelligence model trained to drive a car will not see the one person as your son, it will only see it as an object,let us just modify the problem into one more suitable for our application.
Imagine you are on a self driving car doing 40mph and suddenly out of nowhere a ball comes to the road and a small girl with her dog is running towards it, you will hit one of these things for sure, if you steer left you will avoid the ball and the girl but will hit the dog, if you brake hard you will skid and hit the girl, if you steer right you may end up hitting another car, Now let me ask you something, will a car that only looks at this scenario as a decision making problem, will it be able to make a decision that is morally correct, can anyone program that conscience into the stupid program???.
I am certainly a technology freak and new things related to technology really excites me, but rather than conducting those stupid test that anyone can pass for getting a driver's license, why just not make the test more challenging and advanced.
I am not saying that AI will be smarter in the future and it may end up being far better drivers that humans ever will be, but for the time being AI is mainly used for analytics and optimization problems and it is a long way from being a reliable driver.
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