Hmm I kinda like that…
Milliseconds before a detected eminent impact in a no-win decision instance, car turns to social media to poll its friends and see who should take the hit…
"On the next episode of “Autopilot Confessional…”
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Why don’t we hope for a change of habit instead 
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Been a while. Much friendly reminding. Much nagging. No success to date. (Sigh!) 
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Okay, have to tell this story (because driving in DFW is similar to driving in Houston (as far as the speeds go).
When I was in seminary I had a professor who was always on us about “obeying the law” and driving the speed limit (which in those days was 55mph). One day he came into class and you could see the steam coming off him. He face was beat red and I was thinking he must have read my last paper I had turned in. Turns out he had been driving that morning on I20 and had been pulled over by a state trooper. When the trooper walked up to the window my teacher asked him, “Why did you pull me over? I’m the only one here who was actually doing the speed limit!”
The officer responded, “I know. I can’t slow all of them down, but I can speed you up before you get someone killed.” He wrote him a ticket for impeding traffic. I’m sure my teacher earned it, he had a temper. The judge threw it out, but told him to start diving the speed of traffic around him." You have no idea how good that story made us student feel 
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On the list. Late but on it.
Driving down the 5 lane highway in a metropolitan city is like flying in formation. Each multi-ton vehicle is in the control of an individual Human with varying emotional and psychological states of mind, capacity and attention.
The National highway death toll equates to a 747 crashing every week.
When all vehicles are networked and aware of each other’s intention, people will stop dying.
I look forward to a Powerwall solar cells and driving on sunshine. The ultimate energy source. It’s my hope we haven’t passed the point we can repair the damage we have wrought in our technological adolescence. We might make it. Otherwise the Anthropocene will be marked only by a dark line in the sediment record.
I notice as soon as Tesla hit town every major manufacturer focused on EV. Yeah, research has been ongoing for years, but recently brought into sharp focus by the catalyst that is Elon Musk. He is dragging the auto industry into the future… along with Batteries, solar energy and aerospace
I’ll swear the guy must be somewhere on the autism spectrum.
Looking forward to our Model 3.
That being said, Nothing like cranking up my high performance classic '66 Mustang and putting my foot in it. Good for the cardio. I will miss the exhaust note of an American Muscle V8. 
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Not true. Not even true just accounting for vehicle occupants. There are always going to be pedestrians, rockslides, highway sections falling into the ocean, mechanical defects, etc. If all vehicles were autonomous then fewer people will be killed, but not all. It’s physics - no matter what the machine’s reaction time is, there is a known distance from it where someone stepping, falling or running in front of it is too close to allow the vehicle to stop.
Even our most failsafe computer and mechanical systems fail. It is inevitable that sooner or later one of those failures will kill many people. The thought that this is not true is what led to the horrors on the part of the public to the Space Shuttle disasters. By definition the more autonomous vehicles there are, the more likely such a failure will occur. That’s just science & math.
But because people talk about the utopian vision, that’s exactly what will make the first child’s death (& it will be a child’s death that’s exploited because that’s what we always do) so traumatic as to endanger or at least seriously slow the rollout of the technology. If it’s inconceivable that something will happen, it makes it harder to deal with rationally when it does happen. We would be better served by a national debate about just how the devices will decide who dies so we can get our heads wrapped around it before it’s a 6PM new story with a sobbing mother holding a crushed body to her chest. But we’re unable to have that conversation because the proponents of the technology don’t want to have their vision derailed by a conversation about acceptable deaths.
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Yes of course not all deaths will be prevented, but anything lower than the complement of a 747 dying each week is an improvement. No way is autonomous networked transportation going to be less safe
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I agree, and as one of the ones called on to do those funerals far too often I welcome any advancement that lowers those rates, regardless of inconveniences. I do, however, understand what @jamesdhatch is saying I I think his guess will prove to be rather accurate. It won’t be about the logical reality of the situation, it will be about the emotion and fear and the seemingly cold “number crunching” that allows the AI to decide who lives and dies in a given situation. I think we will get past it, but it may bf a bumpy ride. Hope I’m wrong.
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Yes. It will be like all things, an evolution - and we are amidst it. 
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Because for many no such thing as “acceptable deaths” exist, regardless of how rational the argument may be. Even then the ones who suffer the loss will never accept it as okay or even necessary.
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With the exception of the military my friend. Ok, out of context, but I couldn’t resist. 
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True 
but even then most of the families would argue against them being “acceptable”, at least to them.
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His words are true. People will stop dying. Nowhere did he say ALL traffic related death would stop.
Nobody here believes that self driving cars will be fail safe, nor is anybody claiming that accidents simply won’t happen.
The claim is that there will be significantly less deaths than there were prior to autonomous cars.
Are there people out there that have the utopian vision you speak of? Sure. They aren’t realistic and I think deep down they know it.
I’m not sure where the space shuttle tragedies fit in. Has anyone ever assumed that the shuttle program was infallible? I’m insanely impressed that there have been as few tragedies as there were. I was watching Challenger live. I know it impacted the country, and the reason isn’t that we thought the shuttle would never fail, it was because nearly every child in the country was watching it live. I also remember the Columbia breaking up on entry. It had an exponentially smaller impact because it wasn’t a very high profile mission, and it wasn’t at the height of the space craze like Challenger was.
Will the first death of a child who’s safety was put into the hands of an autonomous car impact the integration of the technology? Absolutely. It’s a shame that more people can’t see through the emotion and look at things logically, but if I learned anything in history class all those years ago, its that people are anything but logical.
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Even in some of the best conversations on this, the “acceptable deaths” are only acceptable if they are not their Friends or Family.
“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Scrooge, Christmas Carol (Then later lamenting that his ‘friends’ passed too soon)
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Yeah, I don’t think ethicists have anything at all to do with it. The car manufacturers would likely choose whatever is safest (preserving the most life, minimising the most damage) followed by whatever shakes out to be cheapest. Because that’s what they already do. My mom knows someone whose child was killed when the back seat folded down during a relatively minor accident. It wasn’t an unknown problem to the car manufacturer; it was an acceptable problem (settling a lawsuit with the families affected versus recalling all the cars to fix to that issue). That kind of thing happens all the time and no one is up in arms about it, except those directly impacted by it. The rest of us are pretty meh. We’re surprisingly meh about a lot of things.
And all that aside, there’s no one ethics. You can easily argue that, ethically speaking, all kids should be saved over all adults. Or that no kids should ever be saved over adults. Or that we shouldn’t even prioritize kids over trees. There is a system of ethics for everything.
I agree that the first one will garner a lot of attention. But people don’t maintain outrage over long periods of time. Unless 2-5 happen in quick succession, everyone will forget about it and move on. And by everyone, I mean the general population. If self driving cars make life even a little more convenient, people are going to be very forgiving.
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I agree with Erin. I think the ethics and philosophy of self driving cars and AI are playing out in academics and at tech conferences, but not so much at dinner tables and policy meetings.
On a whole, our outrage is weak and short lived, sadly.
Also, in a hectic world, convenience rules supreme.
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I believe in this case the manufacturers will use the ethicists as a shield because they know they’ll have to defend the decision. With things like GM, Takata, Ford, et al’s exposed safety issues that then led to the publication of the decision making they all most likely thought they’d get away with keeping it from the public when the decisions were made - and those decisions were likely all about cost first and then other considerations, not having the cost a follow on.
Knowing that my machine will kill someone, and is in fact designed to kill certain people under certain situations vs. thinking it’s a possibility some random passenger might be killed is a vastly different set of decision dynamics. They’ll need all the arguments they can get and they’ll want all the professionals they can get to opine why they were correct in their decisions.
At the end of the day we look at 40,000 deaths in the abstract - we don’t as a society see every one of them - they’re spread out. Once cars are killing people by their decision, then those deaths will be on every front page, every web news org and they’ll be in front of all of us, not just those local to the accident. We’re going to see gruesome pictures and ugly arguments and a lot of pontificating and jousting for advantage by politicians and none of it will be rationally based in terms of the 40K killed today vs the less than that killed tomorrow.
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Is it wrong that I actually enjoy discussions like this 
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Maybe, but you are not alone 
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37 children on average die every year in the US at the hands of their parents leaving them locked in hot cars.
Maybe that would be a good bullet point Pro-Autonomous vehicles. Heaven forbid people actually be held accountable for keeping themselves engaged in the moment at hand. They need their car to sense a live body inside so it can send a text message reminder to their phone to check the back seat before locking up.
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