my friend bought a ride from a waymo for shits and giggles. i was actually intrigued about how the car made decisions on its own and sorta nerd sniped me to learn more about machine learning (not llms).
there’s probably some evil thing the self driving car companies are doing that im not aware of, but I was just interested in the ML aspect.
Unless and until we as a society address the trolley problems raised by self-driving cars—who and what determines who lives in a situation where a choice must be made—I can only look on with dismay.
This is a real issue, and we’ve not yet addressed it. If your car has a choice between saving you or saving a child, or another person, or any number of unusual circumstances made inevitable by the sheer number er of miles collectively driven, what does it do? What do we want it to do? How do we balance the scale between saving your life or sacrificing it to save others?
Outlandish situations may be rare but they will happen, and we need to decide how our machines will weight the lives they are asked to save or sacrifice.
It takes time to accurately analyze the situation, make a decision, and then also direct the car to where it decided to go. Current tech isn’t capable of doing this and even if future tech can, that’s not what it should be doing.
In that time the car could automatically apply intense braking, even if it destroys the car in the process, like those saw blades that detect being touched and near instantly stop. That would probably launch the driver forward, but keep in mind they also have seatbelts and airbags. The pedestrians have nothing to protect them, and as a driver it’s your responsibility to look out for them, so if anyone is to get hurt at all, it should be whoever’s in the drivers seat.
It being referred to as the trolley problem of self driving is not great because it implies that the only option is to choose who dies when in reality there are other choices that can be made instead where potentially no one even gets hurt.