How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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Arthur_Tuxedo
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Arthur_Tuxedo »

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:It's a cheap band-aid to a profoundly unsustainable and energy-intensive automotive lifestyle. I'd rather that public transportation was good enough that cars are what thy should be, an excursion vehicle for the middle class to go on trips to obscure areas, and a mode of transportation for the 3% of the population let on farms. Automated cars increase consumption of resource-limited REMs with their extensive electronics, produce more hideously polluting electronic waste, and provide a bandaid to prolong the existence of suburbs, massive houses, unsustainable commuting distances in terms of fuel consumption and etc. I would rather the technology never be implemented and we instead build lots of rail and lots of buses. Automated cars solve a problem which doesn't exist, and convince people that a 5% gain on reduced CO2 while increasing toxic waste is better than a 100% reduction in CO2 and greenhouse gases for commuting transportation and 90% overall, while reducing toxic waste.
Well, sure, but that's an argument against passenger cars and trucks in general regardless of who's driving. Besides, the marketplace has already thought up some solutions for these issues. Here in SF, I can take an Uber or Lyft downtown and share it with other people who are also going the same way, cutting the price by up to 60% and making it only slightly pricier than the bus. Assuming there are 2 passengers and the vehicle is a Prius, we're getting 100 MPG/Passenger on the trip, which is competitive with any bus or rail system from an efficiency standpoint. Now remove the driver and his/her need to make enough money for food and housing, and the cost could easily compete with the bus system (which is subsidized by the city). Under this structure, many people will do the math and realize that owning a vehicle makes no sense, as a significant number of Zipcar users in this city already have. People who do own vehicles may decide to carpool with others making the same trip and offset the cost of ownership, while others may just pay a monthly fee to carpool in a shared autonomous vehicle with others from the neighborhood, and then hop in a robotaxi for around-town trips. Now let's presume that these cars with 2, 3, and 4 passengers each are slipstreaming in a long line, each one a few inches away from the bumper of the car ahead. To me, that sounds a lot like a train, except without the need for a separate track or the enormous upfront capital costs, and vehicle ownership has been cut by 1/2 to 2/3.
I will also be honest and say that beyond these legitimate complaints, driving is by far well and above the thing that makes me happiest in all of the world. There is a beauty and precision to controlling a eighteen hundred pounds of metal traveling at thirty meters per second, anticipating every curve and gear shift and seeing the perfect union of human and machine as a responsive set. Perhaps I grew up listening to too much Rush, but I'm appalled at the fact that others salivate over banning cars when for a profoundly long time it was the only pleasure in my life, and even as I've journeyed to healthier places remains so very important to my happiness. At 43mpg I can arbitrarily check out of my house and my life and eight hours later be in vastly different climatic zones, empty places where the din and den of humanity are muted and distant thing instead of an omnipresent drone. The idea of replacing that with a world where I have to put my life in the hands of the machine, which may be safer but which guarantees that if I die it was not by my own failure and responsibility, but as the hapless creature of another will, is sort of like the future sinking into a dystopian madhouse. So yes, while I think my critique has validity and that we won't realize this technology to the level you dream of for most of this century, I will also admit that I dread it's realization and profoundly hope I'm dead first.
I get that, and I've been known to enjoy a nice scenic drive myself, but people said the same thing about horseback riding, and the thing is that you can still ride horses if it catches your fancy, just not on the public roadway. Even if human-driven cars are banned from the roads (which I think they eventually will be), I would expect to see a surge in private roads and racetracks where people can drive fast and free without all the distractions of traffic, pedestrians, stop lights, etc.
Also it's another step forward into a world with fewer jobs for average, normal sorts of people, and I think ultimately this is going to create an underclass which is going to cause vast social problems, so I favour the replacement of capitalism with a system, perhaps based on the arts and crafts movement, which voluntarily supports large economic inefficiency to preserve employment, as that creates a rewarding life for the average person that being on the dole will never give. This position can more or less be summarized by Stan Rogers' The Idiot, and, if you think I'm an idiot for holding that view, that people obtain so much objective satisfaction from a job well done that they deserve the right to work one even if their job could be better done by a machine, well, you're welcome to think me an idiot, surely. I'm proud of it.
I haven't read that, but I did read Shop Class as Soulcraft, and I agree that a lot of life's meaning has been lost in the mechanization and routinization of crafts that used to be performed by skilled artisans. I also agree that it's difficult to see how advances in AI and robotics won't put most of us out of work, although it's important to remember that people have been predicting that mechanization would lead to mass unemployment for centuries and for centuries it's instead opened up new industries and created new professions. If that trend runs out of gas, then either a basic guaranteed income or willfully inefficient job creation will be the only option other than riots and societal implosion. I happen to think getting rid of most of the bullshit jobs that make people miserable and freeing them up to be artists, musicians, and craftspeople would be a good thing, but I tend to be optimistic about futurism if you haven't noticed. :)
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by salm »

I see no reason why cars, esspecially robot cars could not become a form of public transportation. Actually there allready is a form of that implemented. Right now there are a couple of cars running on electricity parked in front of the house I live in which I could rent at any time without hassle.

One more question. Since several people are scared that this could put an overly large burden on the poor: Does it happen routinely in the USA that new standards are implemented too quickly and the phasing out period is too short? I mean phasing out old tech is a routine practice that is been done all the time, for example with light bulbs, catalytic converters and stuff like that.
You probably also won´t have to buy a whole new car, because converter kits will pop up if there is a significant market.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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Does it happen routinely in the USA that new standards are implemented too quickly and the phasing out period is too short?
Actually in some cases, I feel that we're not phasing old stuff out fast enough. Take CAFE ratings for average fuel economy. Carmakers have to increase their average fleet MPG by .5 mpg every year. So it takes a whole decade to get a 5mpg average increase. Whoopdie fucking do.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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A higher rate of mileage increase than that could easily prove unsustainable if new technologies for improving mileage stop materializing. Or if people just plain decide not to get rid of old used cars because the economy's in the toilet...
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:A quick Google search shows more like 20%, and that's behind a single truck at bumper distances safe for a human driver. I know from experience that the amount of effort required to keep race pace in cycling goes from trivial to impossible when I pop off the back and get the wind in my face. Anyway, wide vehicles and oversized loads should be trivial for a V2V network (which could handle dynamic number and width of lanes) to accommodate.
Humans on bicycles are very un-aerodynamic, so slipstreams matter more. Trucks also create larger slipstreams than cars do, so a car may not benefit as much from the slipstream of another car as it does from that of a truck.
As far as hurting the poor, the fully-automated highway I'm talking about is 20 years away at the bare minimum, and probably more like 30-50. There's simply no way that in 20 years the necessary sensors and processing power would add more cost than the amount saved by eliminating all cabin controls and linkages, all but the most basic safety equipment, the transmission and most suspension components, and most of the horsepower (partly because of slipstreaming, partly weight-savings, but mostly because people won't demand hundreds of HP when they aren't pushing the pedal). The way I see it, a bare-bones fully autonomous vehicle could cost half or less of a current economy car.
...How on Earth do you eliminate the transmission? The transmission isn't there for a human driver's benefit; it's there to ensure efficient transfer of power from the engine to the wheels. Most transmissions are already automated to the extent that a human driver normally only needs to be able to set the car into "go forward," "go backward," "neutral," and "park," with an option on "first gear" for circumstances where extra traction is needed.

Likewise the suspension- the car needs a suspension in case it hits something, and to avoid damage to delicate items in the passenger compartment. Like the passengers. You can't skimp on that just because there's a robot making the driving decisions.
edaw1982 wrote:The AI of your car will make the best decision relivent to you. "If I do X then Y happens and my occupants die. This parses as unacceptable as my primary programming is to prevent death or excessive damage to my occupants. Therefore I will attempt the action that will cause least damage to my occupants."

If that happens to be 'run into the pedestrians' then that's what the computer will choose if it deems it to be the 'mathmatically logical answer'.
You can't have a machine in charge of your vehicle worrying about anyone else's safety but your own.
Honestly, a realistic car will just do all it can to avoid crashing into obstacles, where pedestrians are a particularly undesirable obstacle to collide with. And yes you would program the (subsentient) computer to do that, as a matter of common sense, because otherwise the legal liabilities would be staggering.
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Well, sure, but that's an argument against passenger cars and trucks in general regardless of who's driving. Besides, the marketplace has already thought up some solutions for these issues. Here in SF, I can take an Uber or Lyft downtown and share it with other people who are also going the same way, cutting the price by up to 60% and making it only slightly pricier than the bus.
Although that works in large part because Uber and Lyft are bypassing the normal regulatory regime on taxis; that can't possibly last.
Under this structure, many people will do the math and realize that owning a vehicle makes no sense, as a significant number of Zipcar users in this city already have. People who do own vehicles may decide to carpool with others making the same trip and offset the cost of ownership, while others may just pay a monthly fee to carpool in a shared autonomous vehicle with others from the neighborhood, and then hop in a robotaxi for around-town trips. Now let's presume that these cars with 2, 3, and 4 passengers each are slipstreaming in a long line, each one a few inches away from the bumper of the car ahead. To me, that sounds a lot like a train, except without the need for a separate track or the enormous upfront capital costs, and vehicle ownership has been cut by 1/2 to 2/3.
Slipstreaming cars a few inches apart isn't going to work because any unexpected stimulus or mechanical failure will cause a massive pileup. Stopping distance isn't just about how long it takes the driver to notice the car in front of him slowing down; it's how long it takes to stop.
I get that, and I've been known to enjoy a nice scenic drive myself, but people said the same thing about horseback riding, and the thing is that you can still ride horses if it catches your fancy, just not on the public roadway. Even if human-driven cars are banned from the roads (which I think they eventually will be), I would expect to see a surge in private roads and racetracks where people can drive fast and free without all the distractions of traffic, pedestrians, stop lights, etc.
Except that in that case you aren't going anywhere; you've effectively banned people from autonomously traveling anywhere outside walking distance.

Replacing a horse with a car is at least an upgrade from the user's point of view. No autonomy is lost. Replacing a car with a robot car is only an upgrade if you don't value your own control over the vehicle. Or, for that matter, the route you're taking, in all probability...
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Arthur_Tuxedo »

Simon_Jester wrote:A higher rate of mileage increase than that could easily prove unsustainable if new technologies for improving mileage stop materializing. Or if people just plain decide not to get rid of old used cars because the economy's in the toilet...
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:A quick Google search shows more like 20%, and that's behind a single truck at bumper distances safe for a human driver. I know from experience that the amount of effort required to keep race pace in cycling goes from trivial to impossible when I pop off the back and get the wind in my face. Anyway, wide vehicles and oversized loads should be trivial for a V2V network (which could handle dynamic number and width of lanes) to accommodate.
Humans on bicycles are very un-aerodynamic, so slipstreams matter more. Trucks also create larger slipstreams than cars do, so a car may not benefit as much from the slipstream of another car as it does from that of a truck.
True, my experience may not be representative here, so if anyone has better figures I'm ready to be corrected.
As far as hurting the poor, the fully-automated highway I'm talking about is 20 years away at the bare minimum, and probably more like 30-50. There's simply no way that in 20 years the necessary sensors and processing power would add more cost than the amount saved by eliminating all cabin controls and linkages, all but the most basic safety equipment, the transmission and most suspension components, and most of the horsepower (partly because of slipstreaming, partly weight-savings, but mostly because people won't demand hundreds of HP when they aren't pushing the pedal). The way I see it, a bare-bones fully autonomous vehicle could cost half or less of a current economy car.
...How on Earth do you eliminate the transmission? The transmission isn't there for a human driver's benefit; it's there to ensure efficient transfer of power from the engine to the wheels. Most transmissions are already automated to the extent that a human driver normally only needs to be able to set the car into "go forward," "go backward," "neutral," and "park," with an option on "first gear" for circumstances where extra traction is needed.
You can eliminate the transmission by placing an electric motor on each wheel axel. I doubt it would work with a gas motor, though.
Likewise the suspension- the car needs a suspension in case it hits something, and to avoid damage to delicate items in the passenger compartment. Like the passengers. You can't skimp on that just because there's a robot making the driving decisions.
Not in the near future, but on a fully automated road a crash would carry similar odds to being struck by lightning, and the other vehicles that would be crashed into would also be similarly constructed.
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Well, sure, but that's an argument against passenger cars and trucks in general regardless of who's driving. Besides, the marketplace has already thought up some solutions for these issues. Here in SF, I can take an Uber or Lyft downtown and share it with other people who are also going the same way, cutting the price by up to 60% and making it only slightly pricier than the bus.
Although that works in large part because Uber and Lyft are bypassing the normal regulatory regime on taxis; that can't possibly last.
The archaic taxi rules needed a mercy bullet to the back of the head anyway, but regardless of how the legalities shake out, the point is that algorithms that are already being deployed will be refined even further in the age of autonomous vehicles and allow the passenger vehicle fleet to achieve similar cost and efficiency to bus and rail systems without the upfront cost and politicking. People can still hog a vehicle all to themselves, of course, but they'll be paying a lot more for the privilege and far fewer will do so.
Under this structure, many people will do the math and realize that owning a vehicle makes no sense, as a significant number of Zipcar users in this city already have. People who do own vehicles may decide to carpool with others making the same trip and offset the cost of ownership, while others may just pay a monthly fee to carpool in a shared autonomous vehicle with others from the neighborhood, and then hop in a robotaxi for around-town trips. Now let's presume that these cars with 2, 3, and 4 passengers each are slipstreaming in a long line, each one a few inches away from the bumper of the car ahead. To me, that sounds a lot like a train, except without the need for a separate track or the enormous upfront capital costs, and vehicle ownership has been cut by 1/2 to 2/3.
Slipstreaming cars a few inches apart isn't going to work because any unexpected stimulus or mechanical failure will cause a massive pileup. Stopping distance isn't just about how long it takes the driver to notice the car in front of him slowing down; it's how long it takes to stop.
Right, but with proper V2V communication, any vehicle that develops a mechanical problem will inform the others before immediate action is required. Cars could also actually touch bumpers (perhaps linked together magnetically), which would prevent impacts in the event of a sudden velocity change. The need for sudden stops is caused by our limited access to information, a problem that AI cars would not suffer.
I get that, and I've been known to enjoy a nice scenic drive myself, but people said the same thing about horseback riding, and the thing is that you can still ride horses if it catches your fancy, just not on the public roadway. Even if human-driven cars are banned from the roads (which I think they eventually will be), I would expect to see a surge in private roads and racetracks where people can drive fast and free without all the distractions of traffic, pedestrians, stop lights, etc.
Except that in that case you aren't going anywhere; you've effectively banned people from autonomously traveling anywhere outside walking distance.

Replacing a horse with a car is at least an upgrade from the user's point of view. No autonomy is lost. Replacing a car with a robot car is only an upgrade if you don't value your own control over the vehicle. Or, for that matter, the route you're taking, in all probability...
Frankly, I don't think many people are going to care about that when the time comes, and the ones who do will be drowned out by those who are annoyed that their commute is twice as long because old geezers are stopping up traffic. Also, horses don't need fancy roads so a significant amount of movement autonomy actually was lost in the transition. Millions of horses that need food, poop everywhere, and travel slowly was not sustainable given the new technological alternatives (internal combustion engines). People driving themselves in large vehicles with hundreds of horsepower with no passengers, guzzling billions of gallons of gas annually and smashing into each other, causing tens of thousands of deaths every year is just as unsustainable, and whether the solution is automated roads or a return to mass transit, autonomy is lost either way.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by bilateralrope »

It occurs to me that the 'morality' programmed into a robot car will not be utilitarian ethics. It will be a rule based ethical system, because that's easier to implement in software.

Obvious question: Who writes these rules ?

The motivation for the companies making the robot cars is simple: CYA, otherwise known as avoiding liability to the company. The easiest way to do that is to get the government to write the rules the cars must follow and pass those rules into law. The companies will do what they can to make sure that there is minimal ambiguity in the law, because ambiguity means the company has to make a decision they could be liable for.

Then those companies implement the law exactly as written and when an accident produces an outcome the public doesn't like, the company will simply say: Our car behaved exactly as the law required. The law does not allow robot cars to behave in any manner other than how they did behave in that accident. If you want the behaviour of our robot cars changed, talk to your politicians and get the law changed. If you get the law changed, we will then adjust the behaviour of our robot cars to comply with the law.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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bilateralrope wrote:It occurs to me that the 'morality' programmed into a robot car will not be utilitarian ethics. It will be a rule based ethical system, because that's easier to implement in software.
It won't be any ethical system.

This entire notion that an automated car makes 'ethical' decisions is based on a false concept, an anthropomorphization, of the vehicle. It's like asking what the ethics of a horse are; the horse hasn't got any. The horse will, of its own accord, seek to avoid collisions and situations where it might damage itself. But there isn't anything in the horses brain that could even begin to say "running smack into a tree is less wrong than running smack into a human being."

It's like asking what ethics a Vroomba would use if it were in a position where making the 'wrong' vacuuming decision could cost lives. The Vroomba doesn't use any ethics; it's a subsentient mechanism following preprogrammed directives. Even if you did program it to "act ethically," what you'd really be doing is deciding in advance which outcomes are ethical, and trying to program the machine to act in ways that lead to those outcomes. Such as steering to avoid anything that looks like a pedestrian, automatically.

In borderline cases where all options lead to hitting a pedestrian, or something similarly disastrous, there is a good chance of the computer's programming locking up or acting counterintuitively, precisely because our intuitive brain models the computer as having a self-aware ethical 'center' that makes these decisions based on the conventional rules of society. And the computer has no such thing.
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:True, my experience may not be representative here, so if anyone has better figures I'm ready to be corrected.
Duchess presented some figures earlier, I believe.
You can eliminate the transmission by placing an electric motor on each wheel axel. I doubt it would work with a gas motor, though.
It is non-obvious that this would constitute a weight savings.

Also... I mean, we could build cars like that now; there is nothing about a human-driven car that requires that it have a single engine with a geared transmission running torque to the wheels. You could even still have a human operating a 'gas pedal;' the details of what instructions that passes to the motors are a black box from the point of view of the end user.

So the idea that future cars will save weight by having a computerized control system where each axle is powered independently by an electric motor is totally separate from the idea that the car will be self-driving. And that's even assuming it would save weight to have multiple motors rather than one motor plus one transmission.
Likewise the suspension- the car needs a suspension in case it hits something, and to avoid damage to delicate items in the passenger compartment. Like the passengers. You can't skimp on that just because there's a robot making the driving decisions.
Not in the near future, but on a fully automated road a crash would carry similar odds to being struck by lightning, and the other vehicles that would be crashed into would also be similarly constructed.
"In case it hits something" in this case includes, oh, potholes.

Do you have a non-joking proposal for how switching to automated cars would somehow prevent roads from forming potholes? If not, a car with a weaker suspension is going to be far more vulnerable to hitting potholes and damaging itself. And, possibly, swerving as a result, into this ultra-low-tolerance ultra-close-together tangle of cars moving with blind disregard for safe following distances, triggering massive hundred-car accidents.

Clever.

This is starting to sound like you're treating the robot car as a panacea, rather than as an actual piece of technology that can do some things but not other things.
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Well, sure, but that's an argument against passenger cars and trucks in general regardless of who's driving. Besides, the marketplace has already thought up some solutions for these issues. Here in SF, I can take an Uber or Lyft downtown and share it with other people who are also going the same way, cutting the price by up to 60% and making it only slightly pricier than the bus.
Although that works in large part because Uber and Lyft are bypassing the normal regulatory regime on taxis; that can't possibly last.
The archaic taxi rules needed a mercy bullet to the back of the head anyway...
Why?
but regardless of how the legalities shake out, the point is that algorithms that are already being deployed will be refined even further in the age of autonomous vehicles and allow the passenger vehicle fleet to achieve similar cost and efficiency to bus and rail systems without the upfront cost and politicking. People can still hog a vehicle all to themselves, of course, but they'll be paying a lot more for the privilege and far fewer will do so.
All the means you've suggested by which the autonomous vehicle fleet could achieve this are... highly dubious, to say the least.

Also, I point out that this reinforces the idea that forcibly making everyone go over to robot cars involves a major sacrifice of individual autonomy. If you're relying on robot cars using brilliant algorithms to figure out where to go, and using carpooling to make it efficient, you're also relying on me being willing to get in a car with whatever random strangers the algorithm says are going to the same general location as I am.

While people are sometimes willing to make that tradeoff, the ability to travel independently of the whims of others, with a degree of privacy and control, is something that 20th century people in the developed world tend to view at a premium. Even services like Zipcar don't drop this concept- because you're basically just renting a car for yourself.
Slipstreaming cars a few inches apart isn't going to work because any unexpected stimulus or mechanical failure will cause a massive pileup. Stopping distance isn't just about how long it takes the driver to notice the car in front of him slowing down; it's how long it takes to stop.
Right, but with proper V2V communication, any vehicle that develops a mechanical problem will inform the others before immediate action is required.
Uh... don't you realize that mechanical defects can occur abruptly and cause entirely unpredictable changes in a car's speed or direction? Like, say, blowing out a tire.

Some of these things will render the car's autopilot physically unable to keep the car on course, it will have to steer for the side of the road or otherwise make unexpected maneuvers.
Cars could also actually touch bumpers (perhaps linked together magnetically), which would prevent impacts in the event of a sudden velocity change.
By that argument, when a train derails people shouldn't suffer severe physical injury because the cars are all connected to each other. Instead, the reverse is true- being on a train when it hits an obstacle large enough to derail it is very unsafe precisely because if one car goes off the rail, they all do.
The need for sudden stops is caused by our limited access to information, a problem that AI cars would not suffer.
Because AI cars will never hit a pothole and have a major drive train component break. Riiight.
I get that, and I've been known to enjoy a nice scenic drive myself, but people said the same thing about horseback riding, and the thing is that you can still ride horses if it catches your fancy, just not on the public roadway. Even if human-driven cars are banned from the roads (which I think they eventually will be), I would expect to see a surge in private roads and racetracks where people can drive fast and free without all the distractions of traffic, pedestrians, stop lights, etc.
Except that in that case you aren't going anywhere; you've effectively banned people from autonomously traveling anywhere outside walking distance.

Replacing a horse with a car is at least an upgrade from the user's point of view. No autonomy is lost. Replacing a car with a robot car is only an upgrade if you don't value your own control over the vehicle. Or, for that matter, the route you're taking, in all probability...
Frankly, I don't think many people are going to care about that when the time comes, and the ones who do will be drowned out by those who are annoyed that their commute is twice as long because old geezers are stopping up traffic.
I think you genuinely might be surprised by the number of people who are uncomfortable with ceding control over their lives.

If you are not surprised and this number is indeed small... well, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think you should act like that's an unalloyed good thing.
Also, horses don't need fancy roads so a significant amount of movement autonomy actually was lost in the transition.
This does not align with the experience of actual horse users, who overwhelmingly sought out roads to travel along...
Millions of horses that need food, poop everywhere, and travel slowly was not sustainable given the new technological alternatives (internal combustion engines). People driving themselves in large vehicles with hundreds of horsepower with no passengers, guzzling billions of gallons of gas annually and smashing into each other, causing tens of thousands of deaths every year is just as unsustainable, and whether the solution is automated roads or a return to mass transit, autonomy is lost either way.
There is a fundamental difference between a situation where people, by individual economic choices, seek to live closer together and rely more heavily on mass transit (possibly including robot taxis) and a situation where the law basically mandates that everyone stop driving their own vehicles in exchange for marginal savings on fuel efficiency.

You've made reasonably good arguments for why the former might happen. But not so much the latter. Your arguments for why the legal system might mandate only robot vehicles on the roads are... rather full of holes.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by The Duchess of Zeon »

Direct drive electric vehicles are a 1900 vintage invention, as a matter of fact, SJ. I love the fact that direct drive is being proposed as a way to improve fuel economy when the gearbox was hailed as a revolution for exactly that purpose in the 1910 era, and that furthermore there is an idea being seriously proposed here that four unsprung motors are going to be more efficient than one motor in the suspension. Does anyone have any idea what four motors worth of unsprung weight would do to fucking up the ride of a car? And the hilarious thing is that none of this is relevant at all to a discussion of automated cars.

As for the taxi rules thing, there we go again, taking away living wages from working class people in a quest for EFFICIENCY. Those taxi tokens guarantee a decent life for someone who can raise kids on the income. Now that's being destroyed in the name of profit. Many libertarians have tried to argue with me in the past and they seem to miss the point that I acknowledge my beliefs result in a less efficient economy, and I simply think that's a good thing because it leads to more moral outcomes. (Supporting Uber and Lyft is basically libertarian, and if you're not a libertarian and support them, you've been duped into supporting the libertarian ideology by a slick marketing campaign and the allure of "tech revolution/sharing economy" codespeech which makes you as a nerd think something is automatically good and blinds you to the reality of it).
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by The Duchess of Zeon »

Also, BY THE WAY, it's still legal to ride a horse on a road. Or a carriage (See: Amish). Or a steam tractor from the 1870s: Yes, for real.

So after 150 years of accommodating new inventions without banning the old, why are we suddenly going to ban the old?

Oh right, because people get excited and confused and think a minor efficiency gain is a universal panacea and confuse multiple technologies. And also think lanes will shrink because apparently containers will get smaller.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Simon_Jester »

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Direct drive electric vehicles are a 1900 vintage invention, as a matter of fact, SJ. I love the fact that direct drive is being proposed as a way to improve fuel economy when the gearbox was hailed as a revolution for exactly that purpose in the 1910 era...
To be fair, independent computerized control of the drive motors might help claw back some of the efficiency lost by having all those extra motors... but I kind of doubt it, on a gut level.
and that furthermore there is an idea being seriously proposed here that four unsprung motors are going to be more efficient than one motor in the suspension. Does anyone have any idea what four motors worth of unsprung weight would do to fucking up the ride of a car? And the hilarious thing is that none of this is relevant at all to a discussion of automated cars.
Now that... sounds like a finance guy trying to be an automotive engineer, yeah.
As for the taxi rules thing, there we go again, taking away living wages from working class people in a quest for EFFICIENCY. Those taxi tokens guarantee a decent life for someone who can raise kids on the income. Now that's being destroyed in the name of profit. Many libertarians have tried to argue with me in the past and they seem to miss the point that I acknowledge my beliefs result in a less efficient economy, and I simply think that's a good thing because it leads to more moral outcomes. (Supporting Uber and Lyft is basically libertarian, and if you're not a libertarian and support them, you've been duped into supporting the libertarian ideology by a slick marketing campaign and the allure of "tech revolution/sharing economy" codespeech which makes you as a nerd think something is automatically good and blinds you to the reality of it).
I'd support Uber and the like just fine... if they obeyed the same laws as other people who do the same thing with fewer cell phone apps.

There are good reasons it's illegal to allow taxi drivers to work more than twelve hours a day, and there are good reasons to require that taxi drivers be paid enough that they won't have to illicitly work more than twelve hours a day in order to make ends meet.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by bilateralrope »

Simon_Jester wrote:
bilateralrope wrote:It occurs to me that the 'morality' programmed into a robot car will not be utilitarian ethics. It will be a rule based ethical system, because that's easier to implement in software.
It won't be any ethical system.

This entire notion that an automated car makes 'ethical' decisions is based on a false concept, an anthropomorphization, of the vehicle. It's like asking what the ethics of a horse are; the horse hasn't got any. The horse will, of its own accord, seek to avoid collisions and situations where it might damage itself. But there isn't anything in the horses brain that could even begin to say "running smack into a tree is less wrong than running smack into a human being."
True. I should have said that it's behaviour would be closest to that of a rule base ethical system. It will not be a case of the car 'deciding' who lives and dies, it will be the car mindlessly following the rules humans have set.
In borderline cases where all options lead to hitting a pedestrian, or something similarly disastrous, there is a good chance of the computer's programming locking up or acting counterintuitively, precisely because our intuitive brain models the computer as having a self-aware ethical 'center' that makes these decisions based on the conventional rules of society. And the computer has no such thing.
Also true. Which is another reason for the companies making robot cars will not want to be the ones writing the rules the cars follow.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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I do accept the idea that by about 2070 we'll definitely be able to ban driver-operated vehicles if we wanted to, I think that the regulatory implementation process will stretch that timeframe out to the end of the century, and I question whether or not you'll ever find the political support for it, in short. I mean the electric car was first demonstrated in 1900 ; its modern incarnation, 1970. Has it replaced the ICE yet? No.

Regenerative brakes on electric vehicles were fielded in 1910, conferring massive performance advantages. Did this drive a large-scale adoption of electric technology for driving vehicles? Why didn't we string catenary over the roads for people to operate electric cars with regenerative brakes? It would have unquestionably been far more efficient. Might have even changed the course of world history by freeing nations under blockade from needing fuel.

I think people are looking at the fact this technology is now possible, and not really thinking through the vast social processes that need to be negotiated before it becomes the default.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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I don´t think anybody was talking about a significantly smaller time frame.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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The Duchess of Zeon wrote:
Regenerative brakes on electric vehicles were fielded in 1910, conferring massive performance advantages. Did this drive a large-scale adoption of electric technology for driving vehicles? Why didn't we string catenary over the roads for people to operate electric cars with regenerative brakes?
point of order- most major cities had done exactly that for a tram system. Ownership of private vehicles only really took off after WW2, based on the ICE development for military vehicles that necessarily operate away from infrastructure.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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220 miles of trolleybus cat in my hometown, I'm quite well aware. The point is that it is being used for a hyper-specialized local service application and hasn't displaced regular buses, despite the numerous advantages. In the same way, the fixed cost of such a system will, I am arguing, severely deter implementation of specialized automated-car-only roadways.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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I doubt fully robotic cars with no manual control will see widespread use in near future. While it could work in cities and on highways one of the reasons to own a car is to be able to go to places that are somewhere in the middle of nowhere where no public transport goes. What if my favorite fishing spot is located at the end of 10 km long muddy dirt road that is not even in GPS map database? How will I tell computer to go where according to its database is only forest and swamp with no road? How computer would know which mud puddle is safe to drive through and which are better to be avoided by driving a bit off road into the meadow?

In near future I expect self driving capability as an optional extra in high end cars for use when driving on highway and cities. I'd love to have car with autopilot that can drive me from home to work and back while I could do something useful on my laptop or just have a sleep. There is no fun driving the same route over and over again.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by AniThyng »

Sky Captain wrote:I doubt fully robotic cars with no manual control will see widespread use in near future. While it could work in cities and on highways one of the reasons to own a car is to be able to go to places that are somewhere in the middle of nowhere where no public transport goes. What if my favorite fishing spot is located at the end of 10 km long muddy dirt road that is not even in GPS map database? How will I tell computer to go where according to its database is only forest and swamp with no road? How computer would know which mud puddle is safe to drive through and which are better to be avoided by driving a bit off road into the meadow?

In near future I expect self driving capability as an optional extra in high end cars for use when driving on highway and cities. I'd love to have car with autopilot that can drive me from home to work and back while I could do something useful on my laptop or just have a sleep. There is no fun driving the same route over and over again.
Yeah this. I just want my car to handle the traffic jam bit of the drive...
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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I think the vast majority of people don´t need the option to go off road all that much. Also, a surprising amount of dirt roads is in the google maps database.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Simon_Jester »

Thing is, there are a lot of people who don't often need the ability to drive their car off road. I haven't done that in quite a long time.

But there are a significant minority of people who do need that ability on a regular basis, for whom a car with no steering wheel is useless no matter how good the autopilot is, and therefore need manual overrides.

And even for me, well, the ability to drive off road if I wanted to, the ability to navigate a road that just happens to not be on the database, the ability to negotiate unexpected and strange obstacles in principle, is worth quite a bit to me. An automated car with no steering wheel would not be worthless to me, but it wouldn't be worth as much as a car I can actually drive manually if needed.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Lagmonster »

You're not addressing salm's obvious point: The biggest market aren't hobbyists. It's urbanites. In a world with reliable robot-driven cars, manually-driven cars will fall into the same niche that ATVs, snowmobiles, RVs, boats, and so forth do today: a luxury item for people with the income or inclination to own them for their hobbies.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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Maybe it is different in the US because of the sheer land size and more wilderness but I checked google maps and i must say that every single dirt road i used as a teenager in the village I grew up in and several km around it is in google maps. So unless these dirt roads are implemented a lot less precisely than normal roads I´d assume that it would be sufficient not only for urbanites but also for the vast majority of villagers.
And if there are areas you have to go to where robot cars really don´t work there wouldn´t be a problem if some people had a manual car. My parents and most other people in that village burn wood for heating their houses which they usually get in the woods with their car and a small trailer. Now, not everybody has a trailer, so they just use their neighbors trailer. The same thing could be done with manual cars. Just ask your neighbor if you can take his or if he´ll help you get the wood. It´s not like everybody needs everything for every task as you can simply share and rent things you need very infrequently.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

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much like tool hire shops?
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Arthur_Tuxedo »

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:I do accept the idea that by about 2070 we'll definitely be able to ban driver-operated vehicles if we wanted to, I think that the regulatory implementation process will stretch that timeframe out to the end of the century, and I question whether or not you'll ever find the political support for it, in short. I mean the electric car was first demonstrated in 1900 ; its modern incarnation, 1970. Has it replaced the ICE yet? No.

Regenerative brakes on electric vehicles were fielded in 1910, conferring massive performance advantages. Did this drive a large-scale adoption of electric technology for driving vehicles? Why didn't we string catenary over the roads for people to operate electric cars with regenerative brakes? It would have unquestionably been far more efficient. Might have even changed the course of world history by freeing nations under blockade from needing fuel.

I think people are looking at the fact this technology is now possible, and not really thinking through the vast social processes that need to be negotiated before it becomes the default.
Sounds like we agree on the major points, then.
Simon_Jester wrote:
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:True, my experience may not be representative here, so if anyone has better figures I'm ready to be corrected.
Duchess presented some figures earlier, I believe.
She did, but the figures I found after a quick search showed about 20% gain, and that's with distances safe for humans. Motor vehicles may be more aerodynamic than bike + rider, but wind resistance is still a huge factor so I wouldn't be surprised if larger efficiencies could be achieved. Being a "finance guy trying to be an automotive engineer", I won't pretend to know the exact figures, but it's assuredly more than 5%.
You can eliminate the transmission by placing an electric motor on each wheel axel. I doubt it would work with a gas motor, though.
It is non-obvious that this would constitute a weight savings.

Also... I mean, we could build cars like that now; there is nothing about a human-driven car that requires that it have a single engine with a geared transmission running torque to the wheels. You could even still have a human operating a 'gas pedal;' the details of what instructions that passes to the motors are a black box from the point of view of the end user.

So the idea that future cars will save weight by having a computerized control system where each axle is powered independently by an electric motor is totally separate from the idea that the car will be self-driving. And that's even assuming it would save weight to have multiple motors rather than one motor plus one transmission.
True, this idea doesn't require self-driving cars.
Likewise the suspension- the car needs a suspension in case it hits something, and to avoid damage to delicate items in the passenger compartment. Like the passengers. You can't skimp on that just because there's a robot making the driving decisions.
Not in the near future, but on a fully automated road a crash would carry similar odds to being struck by lightning, and the other vehicles that would be crashed into would also be similarly constructed.
"In case it hits something" in this case includes, oh, potholes.

Do you have a non-joking proposal for how switching to automated cars would somehow prevent roads from forming potholes? If not, a car with a weaker suspension is going to be far more vulnerable to hitting potholes and damaging itself. And, possibly, swerving as a result, into this ultra-low-tolerance ultra-close-together tangle of cars moving with blind disregard for safe following distances, triggering massive hundred-car accidents.

Clever.

This is starting to sound like you're treating the robot car as a panacea, rather than as an actual piece of technology that can do some things but not other things.
Any self-driving car worth its salt should be able to detect and avoid potholes large enough to cause damage, but you're right that shocks and suspension would still be needed for smaller ones, so I'll concede the claim about suspensions.
The archaic taxi rules needed a mercy bullet to the back of the head anyway...
Why?
I don't know how it is in other cities, but here in SF the medallion system is an old boys club that enforces the status quo and freezes out competition. Since a new medallion is cost-prohibitive for an independent driver and the well-connected owners who hoard them want to get their money back, the result is a taxi industry running laughably outdated equipment where people call for cabs that never show up and get chewed out by rude dispatchers when they call back for an ETA, cab drivers that are lucky to clear minimum wage after expenses and then still get nailed for a 5-10% "convenience fee" for taking credit cards, which they are required to do, and often with a machine that blares ads at the passengers. Uber and Lyft may be flouting the law, but at least they provide a pleasant and convenient experience for passengers and a chance at a living wage for drivers (provided they learn how to work the system).
but regardless of how the legalities shake out, the point is that algorithms that are already being deployed will be refined even further in the age of autonomous vehicles and allow the passenger vehicle fleet to achieve similar cost and efficiency to bus and rail systems without the upfront cost and politicking. People can still hog a vehicle all to themselves, of course, but they'll be paying a lot more for the privilege and far fewer will do so.
All the means you've suggested by which the autonomous vehicle fleet could achieve this are... highly dubious, to say the least.
Even if my ideas about bumper-to-bumper capabilities prove utopian, ride sharing alone will vastly increase the fuel and space efficiency of the highway system. Granted, expanded ride sharing systems don't require AI cars to work, but I bet a lot more people would be willing to share rides when they're not driving their own car.

Also, traffic jams are almost always caused by impatient drivers changing lanes, so a critical-mass of cars with self-driving capability or even adaptive cruise control will solve that issue, leading to large efficiencies in fuel consumption and travel time. That's two large, non-dubious efficiency gains right there.
Also, I point out that this reinforces the idea that forcibly making everyone go over to robot cars involves a major sacrifice of individual autonomy. If you're relying on robot cars using brilliant algorithms to figure out where to go, and using carpooling to make it efficient, you're also relying on me being willing to get in a car with whatever random strangers the algorithm says are going to the same general location as I am.

While people are sometimes willing to make that tradeoff, the ability to travel independently of the whims of others, with a degree of privacy and control, is something that 20th century people in the developed world tend to view at a premium. Even services like Zipcar don't drop this concept- because you're basically just renting a car for yourself.
I'm aware of that, but there's a big difference between driving oneself instead of, say, taking the bus or hitchhiking, and being presented with the binary choice of sharing a ride or spending a lot more for the same ride. I only had to use Lyft Line (at a 60% savings) once before deciding never to hail a solo ride again.
Right, but with proper V2V communication, any vehicle that develops a mechanical problem will inform the others before immediate action is required.
Uh... don't you realize that mechanical defects can occur abruptly and cause entirely unpredictable changes in a car's speed or direction? Like, say, blowing out a tire.

Some of these things will render the car's autopilot physically unable to keep the car on course, it will have to steer for the side of the road or otherwise make unexpected maneuvers.
Unexpected for you and me, but not unexpected for a system with a 1-2 ms response time. A human driver can't know that a tire is about to blow until it does, but a sensor'd up computer can. By the time corrective maneuvers are required, all nearby vehicles will know about the imminent blowout and can be prepared to give the faulty vehicle the space it needs, perhaps even guiding it onto the shoulder. A networked hive-mind of vehicles just doesn't need to be protected from each other in the way that inattentive and poorly-equipped individuals do.
Cars could also actually touch bumpers (perhaps linked together magnetically), which would prevent impacts in the event of a sudden velocity change.
By that argument, when a train derails people shouldn't suffer severe physical injury because the cars are all connected to each other. Instead, the reverse is true- being on a train when it hits an obstacle large enough to derail it is very unsafe precisely because if one car goes off the rail, they all do.
That has more to do with the nature of railed vehicles than linked cars. Highways have shoulders on each side for most of the route, so there's a bailout mechanism that trains lack, particularly if other vehicles were helpers to guide a failed car to safety rather than projectiles to smash into it. I think the crux of the disagreement here is that you're still envisioning traffic in the adversarial way that it exists today and not the cooperative hive mind that it would become under a networked system.
The need for sudden stops is caused by our limited access to information, a problem that AI cars would not suffer.
Because AI cars will never hit a pothole and have a major drive train component break. Riiight.
See my response to tire blowouts above.
Except that in that case you aren't going anywhere; you've effectively banned people from autonomously traveling anywhere outside walking distance.

Replacing a horse with a car is at least an upgrade from the user's point of view. No autonomy is lost. Replacing a car with a robot car is only an upgrade if you don't value your own control over the vehicle. Or, for that matter, the route you're taking, in all probability...
Frankly, I don't think many people are going to care about that when the time comes, and the ones who do will be drowned out by those who are annoyed that their commute is twice as long because old geezers are stopping up traffic.
I think you genuinely might be surprised by the number of people who are uncomfortable with ceding control over their lives.

If you are not surprised and this number is indeed small... well, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think you should act like that's an unalloyed good thing.
Don't get it twisted, I'm not coming out in favor of kicking humans off the road with the iron boot of the law. I'm simply predicting that in 30-50 years' time, the technology will be mature enough and the benefits will be so great that society will want at least most of the highway lanes to be reserved for AI cars so that they can get to their destinations more quickly, cheaply, and safely, but it will be a gradual transition. First the cars will be mandated to carry manual overrides, then years later the manual controls will be optional but most buyers will still want them if only from inertia, and after a period of many years when most buyers are choosing to save money by foregoing the manual overrides, people will realize that the highways would be a lot more efficient if at least one lane were reserved for self-driving cars only. Once enough people have noticed that the AI-car lane always seems to move faster and with fewer problems than the other lanes, it will be expanded to the two left-most lanes, then three, until finally the human drivers are left with one designated lane to share with the Amish horse carts.

Sure, life might suck more for the few stubborn holdouts, but will be greatly improved for everyone else and for the environment, so I'd say the transition will definitely be a good thing, if not quite an unalloyed one.
Also, horses don't need fancy roads so a significant amount of movement autonomy actually was lost in the transition.
This does not align with the experience of actual horse users, who overwhelmingly sought out roads to travel along...
Yes, but it's trivial to detour from the route and smell the roses on horseback, not so easy when traveling along the highway at 65. As someone who makes deliveries part-time using a car and bike (similar to horse travel in many ways), the amount of autonomy given up when driving is significant. For instance, if I forget the best route to take or want to change the music or text somebody, I can't just stop my car in the middle of the street, but on a bike I can pull over anytime, anywhere. Yet 99 times out of 100 people with the means to do so will choose car travel over bicycle (or horse) because the gains in convenience outweigh the loss of autonomy, and I don't see any reason for that calculation to change re: self-driving cars.
Millions of horses that need food, poop everywhere, and travel slowly was not sustainable given the new technological alternatives (internal combustion engines). People driving themselves in large vehicles with hundreds of horsepower with no passengers, guzzling billions of gallons of gas annually and smashing into each other, causing tens of thousands of deaths every year is just as unsustainable, and whether the solution is automated roads or a return to mass transit, autonomy is lost either way.
There is a fundamental difference between a situation where people, by individual economic choices, seek to live closer together and rely more heavily on mass transit (possibly including robot taxis) and a situation where the law basically mandates that everyone stop driving their own vehicles in exchange for marginal savings on fuel efficiency.

You've made reasonably good arguments for why the former might happen. But not so much the latter. Your arguments for why the legal system might mandate only robot vehicles on the roads are... rather full of holes.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Sky Captain »

Lagmonster wrote:You're not addressing salm's obvious point: The biggest market aren't hobbyists. It's urbanites.
Why would they even need their own car anyway? If you use car only to get around city and maybe occasionally travel to another town or city a robot taxi will be enough.

And even in city sometimes manual control can be useful. For example a garbage truck broken down and blocking the street, but it can be avoided by carefully driving on the sidewalk to pass it (technically illegal maneuver because you are not allowed to drive on a sidewalk). A computer probably would sot solve that problem because sidewalk is no go area and that's all. It would just stop and wait till the truck is removed. Sometimes random unpredictable shit happens that is easily solvable by human, but would force computer to stop and wait uselessly. Computers are good when dealing with common routine stuff, but they still lack capability to deal with problems outside their programmed parameters. Kind of like in aviation where autopilots do routine flying better than human pilots, but can't deal well with possible emergencies.
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Re: How'd you program the morality of auto-cars?

Post by Alkaloid »

This entire notion that an automated car makes 'ethical' decisions is based on a false concept, an anthropomorphization, of the vehicle. It's like asking what the ethics of a horse are; the horse hasn't got any. The horse will, of its own accord, seek to avoid collisions and situations where it might damage itself. But there isn't anything in the horses brain that could even begin to say "running smack into a tree is less wrong than running smack into a human being."
Of course the car won't make an ethical decision. The car won't make a decision, it will follow a set of rules that will be programmed into it by someone, and that person will be making an ethical decision, and there are all sorts of ethical decisions to be made. In the case that the car can not avoid hitting pedestrians or other vehicles (and I can think of a bunch of circumstances like that, involving two lane streets and merging trucks especially, or oblivious children stepping into traffic) should the car hit the pedestrian, or hit another vehicle? If there is a possibility the car will, in rare circumstances collide with another car when it could have been avoided because of a third factor (say, small child on the road) should a buyer be warned of this before purchasing the car? (because I can tell you now, I am sure as shit never buying a robot car if it ever rules 'go under a B-Double' is ever an acceptable solution to a problem).
Maybe it is different in the US because of the sheer land size and more wilderness but I checked google maps and i must say that every single dirt road i used as a teenager in the village I grew up in and several km around it is in google maps. So unless these dirt roads are implemented a lot less precisely than normal roads I´d assume that it would be sufficient not only for urbanites but also for the vast majority of villagers.
And if there are areas you have to go to where robot cars really don´t work there wouldn´t be a problem if some people had a manual car. My parents and most other people in that village burn wood for heating their houses which they usually get in the woods with their car and a small trailer. Now, not everybody has a trailer, so they just use their neighbors trailer. The same thing could be done with manual cars. Just ask your neighbor if you can take his or if he´ll help you get the wood. It´s not like everybody needs everything for every task as you can simply share and rent things you need very infrequently.
Underground parking lots? Campgrounds? Moving a car onto a sports field to pick up an injured 12 year old and drive him to hospital? Move your car into the backyard so you can use the headlights to light up the back of the house and fix a tarp over the gaping hole in the roof a falling tree has made? There are all sorts of reasons to move a car that are not specifically drive from venue A to venue B and then stop precisely our the front, and anything that cannot be precisely predicted and allowed for by a programmer who has probably never seen your house, your hometown or a member of your family needs some manual controls.
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