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[Unpaid Post] The Real Moral Dilemma of Self-Driving Cars (Patreon)

Published:
2017-01-20 01:01:58
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

This video was sponsored by BMW. They asked me to come to CES and take a ride in their self-driving car and I agreed. I also insisted on having full editorial control over the video. The thing I wanted to talk about was the morality of autonomous cars - something I've been meaning to make a video about for a while.

Lot's of people have gotten hung up on the Trolley Problem - the idea that someone will have to write the software for what an autonomous car should do when it gets into an accident (particularly tricky accidents involving children or seniors, criminals, or cats etc.). I think these ethical dilemmas are distractions.

They miss the point that the vast majority of accidents have no resemblance to trolley problems. 94% involve human error and they kill 30,000+ people in the US alone every year. Autonomous cars will reduce those numbers.

Errors may still result in injuries and fatalities, so the thorny question is who can we blame? But I find it problematic that since we get caught up in hypothetical dilemmas, can't figure out who to blame, and have a bias toward human drivers, more people will die on the roads as we delay the widespread implementation of self-driving cars.

The video was sponsored by BMW, but the opinions expressed are my own.

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The Real Moral Dilemma of Self-Driving Cars

We talk about all the potentially challenging situations autonomous cars could get into but not about how human drivers are not very good. Tens of thousands die on the roads every year in collisions, most of which could be prevented by autonomous vehicles.

Comments

veritasium
>>3645409

Patrons were not charged for this video (because it's sponsored) but I shared this post with all patrons who contribute $1+

Charley

Great video, Derek. Despite all the journalists hyping the trolley problem as enthusiastically as if this were the first time they've encountered basic philosophy, I've never really taken these arguments seriously. I'm genuinely surprised whenever anyone does. Car: "Gee, should I swerved into the vehicle on the left or the vehicle on the right?" Programmer: "Neither, just apply the brakes." But what if the brakes fail, you say? Well? What if? And while you're pondering that: what if your brakes fail while you are manually driving the car? Because it's no more, and no less likely to happen to you than to an autonomous vehicle. So the problem doesn't arise from the vehicle's autonomy, and you driving manually wouldn't have fixed it. I admit: I don't much like the level of autonomy where I *can't* take control in a crisis. Don't like it one little bit, actually. But really, my comfort in the alternative is largely derived from the illusion of control, which (make no mistake) we human absolutely love. In reality though, I'm also honest enough to admit that if you give me a crisis that an autonomous vehicle can't respond quickly enough to, the odds are pretty good there's nothing I can do about it either. Fortunately, such crises are vanishingly rare.

Illusion XIII

The thing that I find amusing about the Trolley problem is that people think, "Oh no, computers will be making moral decisions! Can we trust them to make the right one? How can we allow a computer to quantify the value of human lives?" But that ignores the fact that the current alternative is actually simply trusting Blind Luck to determine the outcome. Because stop fooling yourself, if you were behind the freight truck, and barrels were falling, you wouldn't make a moral choice whether to swerve into the motorcycle or the station wagon, you would reflexively react and jerk the wheel in whatever direction instinctively felt safest (most likely the motorcycle, because your eyes would see more open space on that side). So the people arguing this question of allowing a computer to make ethical decisions are being delusional if they think that it's a choice between "computer deciding ethics" and "good, moral humans deciding ethics". The real choice is "computer deciding ethics" and "barely any ethical consideration taking place at all". And while yes, someone in the programming and engineering process does ultimately have to encode that ethical decision into the software, that fact shouldn't stand in the way of acceptance, as if we're handing over some moral reins to a heartless machine. The reins never existed, they're being created as we go, and if anything, that's an improvement.

Illusion XIII

And yes, I love starting sentences with conjunctions. It's a vice of mine.

Anonymous

I am really annoyed by these hypotheticals, I've never seen an actual measurable example of these "dilemma's". Just pretentious people thinking they came up with the death of self driving cars, or people using it to push their moral agenda. So unless someone can set out a measurable example where they can proof in simulation that a *reasonable* case exists where a choice can be made, they should stop talking.