phe_de wrote:What would an Asimov-car do?
Those moral dilemmas are not new; and I believe that killing 5 thugs who deliberately jump in front of a car is preferable to killing an innocent bystander.
Which is also why I would not pull the lever in the runaway carriage scenario.
I don't think the 3 Laws of Robotics cover this event.
Gauging people's motivations and intentions - particularly when haven't had an opportunity to talk to them or know anything about their background - is very difficult to do reliably. Whilst five "rough looking" guys might "jump out" in front of the car, they could be perfectly innocent. People have been shown to jump to the wrong conclusion about events just looking a snapshot of information and people will be programming the computer that has to make the same information.
In the absence of anything other than "how they look" I don't see you'd have any option but to base it on numbers. Which in turn would leave the system open to abuse.
In turn this then makes me want to broaden the scope of the moral debate because we are dealing with a fairly defined scenario. The options are killing drivers/passengers in the car or people in the street. The people in the car have a justification for on the road - the people in the road are less likely to have a legitimate justification, and at the very least they should know as soon as they go on the road that they are entering a dangerous environment. And because the occupants of the car are more likely to have a reason to be there I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Furthermore, if a computer wasn't driving the car but a human was, what would the human do? It'd be interesting to see if there's any information or stats on the proportion of instances where a driver has deliberately risked their own life to avoid hitting pedestrians and vice versa - but the cynic in me suspects that generally the human driver drives into the pedestrians. If we know that a human driver would generally take one course of action over the other should we set the cars to do the same?
Finally, why not make this a user setting? Let the driver set whether or not they are willing to risk sacrificing themselves or risk prosecution when they first configure the car. People (like the thugs you describe) will be less willing to risk jumping out in front of cars if they don't know what option the driver has selected.