TheAnonFeels t1_j5z8mt9 wrote on January 26, 2023 at 4:28 PM

As many people have said...

Humans do this every accident... just less accurately.. People weigh things like there's a semi, and there's a car a family...

If the AI had no other options besides this trolley example, then it's logical deduction is the single person. We would consider this legally logical for anyone... but with human drivers, there's a chance they're not even going to see the large group by looking at their phone, or dash, or you name it..

These decisions already happen regularly, as long as the AI is choosing logically, and statistically accurate on those decisions... The number of lives saved will be astronomical compared to humans driving.

SoylentRox t1_j61ooee wrote on January 27, 2023 at 2:03 AM

To add to this: self driving stacks can (i assume they do) bin each detected object to an entity class.

Objects from class "road barriers" or "assorted road obstacles" are worth less than class "bus" which is worth less than class "school bus" which is worth less than class "semi".

So while the machine won't know if the school bus is empty, if there's ever a choice of which object to plow into, it will have somewhere in the codebase an approximate value by class. (and then also weight by the kinetic energy of the collision - it might choose to hit the school bus if it predicts a lower KE at impact than the other choices)

TheAnonFeels t1_j63rzib wrote on January 27, 2023 at 2:44 PM

Definitely, eventually things will all have weights, as far as i know (using tesla as an example since they've taken this the furthest) they do object detection to find pedestrians or cars for that matter. Taking it further and adding weights to the object and then further into damage prediction would be a great way to extend that.

However I'm not sure what advantage it would have if AI driven cars' accident rate falls so low that collisions are rare, outside of weighting human/human carrying things vs property.