Further to your recent advice on avoiding collisions with oncoming “over-takers”, in an emergency where avoiding one thing means hitting another, how should we select the least damaging option? FNW
You have just defined one of the biggest challenges for AI programming in no-driver cars. Technically, the answer can be readily calculated. Morally and emotionally, there is no absolute answer.
The choice will depend on how you measure the meaning of “damage”. To the vehicle? To its occupants? To road furniture? To animals? Or to other motorists and bystanders (e.g. a line of people standing at a bus stop, or… a mother pushing a pram!)
The doubt is not so much whether AI can be taught to recognise and prioritize those options and others in a split second. It probably can… or will soon be able to. The issue is what the priorities should be. And who should decide them? And who will be culpable for a bad choice?
The probability is that avoiding damage to “human life” would be put at the top of the list. But that begs the question, “whose?” The driver, his passengers, occupants of another vehicle, a nearby boda-boda rider, several pedestrians (and would “how many?” change the answer)?
If driverless cars were offered “optional priority” choices, which would most owners choose: Save me or be kind to animals?
Technically, the severity of a collision depends on how fast you (or what you hit) are going, how hard and heavy the object you hit is, and how quickly (in how short a distance) the crash will bring you from speed to a stop. These factors determine the “force” of the collision.
Anything you can do to reduce any of those factors will reduce the force.
So, do all you can to reduce speed before the bang. If you have the choice, don’t hit anything that will bring you to an instant halt – head-on will do that, but so will a stout tree or something made of reinforced concrete or mother-earth rocks at the bottom of a long free-fall off a cliff.
Compared with those, most other cars are quite “soft” – they have crumple zones that absorb some of the force, as will turning a face-to-face head-on into a glancing blow.
If, with brakes and steering, you can manage any or all of those reductions, your car will do a lot to help keep you alive – it will absorb a lot of force without crushing you, it will hold you in your seat with belts, it will inhibit whiplash with head restraints, and it is ever more likely it will cancel or cushion your meetings with hard objects by inflating airbags in a nanosecond. Bear that in mind before you choose the mum-and-pram.
The doors should stay shut, the passenger compartment should resist crushing, your windscreen should not turn into spears, the engine should go under the car, not over your feet, the steering shaft should fold to spare your ribs, the seat should keep shape to protect your pelvis and spine, and on 99.9 percent of occasions, the car should not explode or burst into flames.
The principles of force reduction will always apply. How you achieve them must be decided on a case-by-case basis. On the finer ethical issues, AI will do what it has been told, which will be whatever persuades most buyers to write cheques.
More than a few collisions take place off the side of the road. All drivers should be aware of that. Though in rare instances the car approaching the stream might have the best escape route to the right of the oncoming stream, the general rule that both/all drivers should follow is to evade to their LEFT. Any other manoeuvre doesn’t avoid a collision – it invites one.
