Team of researchers published their study Thursday in the journal Science and discovered the public has a conflicted view regarding the future of self-driving technology.
Will self-driving cars be the ones to make the decision whether they hit the passenger or the pedestrians?
It's hard to imagine but a new survey suggests that that may be what people want to see in self driving cars.
“Experts say that 90 percent of accidents are avoidable by technology that basically will eliminate human error,” said study co-author Iyad Rahwan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. “The other 10 percent are caused by less controllable things, like maybe bad weather conditions, or mechanical failures, or just kind of random freak accidents, that not even a very sophisticated computer can avoid. And it’s those minority of accidents that may lead to tradeoffs.”
“Most people want to live in in a world where cars will minimize casualties,” said Rahwan, explaining the “social dilemma” various respondents discover themselves in. “But everybody wants their own car to protect them at all costs.”
Experts think that in many cases humans often don’t know what they really want, and tend to be paradoxical in nature.
“It shouldn’t be surprising that ordinary people haven’t thought deeply enough about ethics to be consistent,” said California Polytechnic State University Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group director Patrick Lin, speaking to Gizmodo. “Most people think that ethics is just about your ‘gut instinct’, but there’s so much more to that. It’s practically a science, complete with guiding principles or laws.”
However, study shows that what people really want to ride self driving car that puts passengers first. If the car has to choose between hitting into a wall or hitting pedestrian.
Surveys conducted in the past shows that people tend to take a utilitarian approach to safety ethics. People generally agree that a car with one rider should swerve off the road and crash to avoid a crowd of many pedestrians. But when the survey’s respondents were asked if they’d take a ride in a self driving car programmed in this way, they said no.
The study also showed that people do not like the idea of having the government regulate the auto industry to enforce utilitarian principles.
Rahwan and his colleagues warned that the worries over regulations could “paradoxically increase casualties by postponing the adoption of a safer technology.”
