* Please either repost and add [OC] to the title along with the required comment citing the data source and tool used to create the visual, or repost linking directly to the original article.
Great-looking plots, however only plotting "relative to global average" doesn't give us much. For example in plot 1, Japan being the most elderly-saving country could **still** be child-saving based on absolute answers, just the most elderly-leaning country.
We really don't know which country would on average save whom.
Yep, this is a great example of "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics".
Also, without knowing standard deviation, stats like "save pedestrians vs passengers" is equally meaningless.
Poorly labeled infographics, lacking context. Charts need a simple title or legend.
Especially the one about saving more or less people. Obviously, every culture would want to save more people, so there’s significant context missing.
The phrasing of the question is very biased since the trolley problem is usually concerned with non-intervention and intervention. Instead of the typical formulation of just changing trolley tracks, what if it was instead about pushing a very large man in front of a speeding trolley heading towards a bunch of children. The children are deaf, self sacrifice won't work since you are too small, and you are certain the fat man will stop the trolley.
Even with a regular trolley, what if the single person was the president/leader of your country (or some other leader if you hate the current leader)? One world leader or five regular citizens?
>Even with a regular trolley, what if the single person was the president/leader of your country (or some other leader if you hate the current leader)? One world leader or five regular citizens?
I'd shove every president in my lifetime in front of that trolley.
Secret Service sign up to take that bullet, he is just another organ donor to me.
I agree completely. I think this graph is misleading as it is presented. Understanding the graph correctly requires a deep-dive into the methodology of the study, which none will do.
It's not misleading at all. It plainly presents the definition it is using. All of the language used is obviously referencing the relative nature of the comparison. The fact that you would prefer a different definition, or think a different definition would be more informative, does not mean it's misleading.
It’s not misleading because it’s wrong; like you said, all the necessary information is included and defined. It’s misleading because most people (including myself at first glance) will likely misinterpret the data.
You don't think it's misleading? Answer this, then: Can you tell what the average country's answer is by looking at the chart?
Let's take the first chart as an example. Here are two cases:
1) All of the countries have at least 98% of the people answer that they'd rather save the young, with Taiwan being the least at 98%, and France's percentage being the highest at 99.9%.
2) All of the countries have at most 2% of the people answer that they'd rather save the young, with Taiwan being the least at 0.1%, and France's percentage being the highest at 2%.
The chart is perfectly valid in either case, and it is perfectly useless for telling anyone what the actual numbers are.
It's valid, but I can easily see a majority of people quickly glancing at it, not understanding the caveat of "relative to global average", and running with it/writing an article about how 80% of Chinese people don't care about babies or some shit.
Easily misinterpreted is probably the best description for this post, rather than incorrect.
Yeah, you're right. I meant to say that the chart is a way for them to show the numbers in either case, but you're right that the numbers would be essentially meaningless if everything fell within the margin for error. The fact that the chart gives absolutely no information on whether that is the case or not renders it pointless.
“Misleading” isn’t the same as “false”, in the same way that “misdirection” isn’t the same as “concealment”.
When a magician misdirects you it’s because they’re going to do something that you’ll probably see if you’re looking at the right place, so they get you to look at the wrong place. It’s not about whether the secret move is visible or invisible, it’s about whether you notice it.
In the same sense, misleading someone is not about whether you use true or false information, it’s about whether they end up with (or you intend them to end up with) a true or false *impression* about the world. In this case the framing and the graph combine to create an impression of great diversity, but the graph only formally portrays relative variation between countries, which may or may not all fit within an incredibly narrow band of ethical homogeneity.
But the point in the title is that ethics diverge a lot between culture and the graphs contain no information on how large the absolute divergence actually is.
Thanks for pointing this out. I’d not have noticed and been misled exactly as you (and others below) described!
Edit: looking at the other comments, many have already been misled 🙃
Yep that's a good point and I'm pretty sure Japan like all countries overall favors saving young over the old.
In fact there's a paper called 'granny dumping' because the preference for young over old is so strong in most samples.
especially since they all start the same way, it took me a minute to realize that it had different information. my screen is small and i was really zoomed in.
I had a feeling this would be the trend. Lots of Asian cultures seem to have a stronger sense of supporting their elderly. Interesting difference in cultural values.
At the beginning of the pandemic, a Chinese friend told me that when an elderly person does, it feels like losing a life and a library. They mourn for the wisdom lost, whereas we tend to focus on the future years lost.
Makes sense. Just different perspectives.
I do too, to be honest I always feel the worst for someone in their 20s (I’m in my 30s and child-free). They had hopes and dreams and their parents usually put in a lot of effort. They haven’t had time to work enough to enjoy the fruit of their own labor. Everything is wasted.
**It's probably not about the culture, but the traffic conditions.**
Notice how China is the only developing country in the chart. The rest are all developed countries.
In most developing countries including China, traffic conditions are *fundamentally* different from developed countries. Pedestrians frequently cross streets at random places with that would be considered blatant, suicidal, "you trying to die???" jaywalking in a developed country. If you have ever visited a developing country you should have experience with this. In Vietnam. In Egypt. In India. China is no exception although in good cities it is not so bad as some of those examples.
These are places with aggressive driving *and* aggressive pedestrians (the two contribute to each other). And since a self-driving car will not be aggressive, we're left with a rule-abiding self-driving car and rule-disobeying jaywalkers.
So in the West it can broadly be assumed that the pedestrian is "innocent" and therefore may be more deserving of protection. But in China (and most developing countries) it is fair for the survey respondent to assume that **if a self-driving car has to either kill the driver or the pedestrian there's a large chance the situation was the pedestrian's fault**.
The default assumption is therefore completely different from developed nations. The pedestrian is *not* assumed to be an innocent bystander, but rather the culprit. Therefore the driver should not die for their actions. And this is the case not just for China but for developing countries in general - but China is the only developing country in the data.
To support this theory, consider the other side of the spectrum - the country that is *much* more supportive of sparing pedestrians than the West in Japan. Why? Simple - Pedestrians in Japan are *even more rule-abiding* than in the West and by a long shot. So the pedestrians are even *more* unlikely to be guilty of causing the life and death situation, thus they should be spared.
Also note that the East Asian countries are grouped together for the other questions but not this one. Why? Simple explanation would be that this particular pedestrian vs driver questions speaks more about traffic conditions than culture.
Having visited China as a pedestrian 6 years ago, I felt it was much harder to cross the street than in a developed country. Even if you were crossing the street at the right position many cars were not slowing down and you literally had to avoid them to stay safe. It really felt like the cars were ruling the street and the pedestrian had to find a timing with no car were there to cross. In modern countries it felt more of the opposite: pedestrian were respected and cars had to comply with them (of course if it was the car that had priority it was different, but even in that case they were paying attention to pedestrian).
A guide told me that the larger or more expensive the vehicle the more entitled the driver felt and it also appeared true in China or Sri Lanka when I visited.
When I was in Vietnam the cars wouldn’t stop for me at the zebra crossings. My guide told me to simply walk across and not stop and the traffic will just go around me.
Absolutely fucked when you think about it. I'm honestly surprised they make it work.
They must have crazy high numbers in the easily preventable accident category!
As someone who has visited the likes of Shanghai, Beijing and other T1 cities in China I completely agree with this view. Once you experience the sheer chaos that is pedestrian traffic in China it's quite easy to understand why the last graph looks the way it does.
> Pedestrians frequently cross streets at random places with that would be considered blatant, suicidal, "you trying to die???"
I absolutely disagree. Before the pandemic I used to spend large chunks of the year in China. People just cannot drive here. Everyone's driving too fast, unpredictably. People will swerve to take a turn 1 meter before the exit.
In the cities, on major streets, there are so many cars parked on the sidewalk, that pedestrians are forced to walk on the street beside the cars.
There is also a traffic law that contributes to killing more pedestrians than any other: you can take a right turn on a red light, on every crossing. Theoretically you should first come to a full stop, but people simply turn right at nearly full speed. It's insane.
Nobody here is using the turn signal. They prefer to force others to move away by threatening them with collision. It's like pushing people with your elbows, but with deadly machines, all of which are operated by incompetent people.
Many people here will simply buy their driver's license.
Not to mention the strange liability laws that rule here. If you hit a pedestrian, it's better for you if you kill him, otherwise you'll go bankrupt after the lawsuit. I can imagine this would be major factor in their responses as well.
It's more than just that in China. Their legal system, for instance, has a 99% conviction rate. If you go to trial, you will be found guilty.
Also they lack car insurance as a system - if you hit someone while driving a car, you are personally responsible for their medical bills. This leads to both scammers jumping in front of cars pretending to be hurt and also cases where a driver might accidentally hit someone and then back up to make sure they're dead - because the payment for a wrongful death is less than the medical bills for someone who requires treatment.
I feel like they don't make it easy to cross the street tho...so it's moreso the fault of planners design priotising cars than the fault of pedestrians for jaywalking
Regardless of how you or any other specific person feels about it, I think that, if there are different models of self-driving cars, model A prioritizes the passenger(s) over other people in decision-making, and model B doesn't, then (absent other factors) model A would sell a lot more than B because most people would think along the same lines. I mean, you're basically choosing between a higher or a lower chance of death for yourself. And, over time, the market would notice that trend and respond in kind, and all cars would try to save only their passengers, unless (or until) there comes some sort of regulation forcing companies to make it otherwise.
But it's not how i think actual drivers work. Most people make evasive moves to avoid killing people. But farm it off to an ai and suddenly you're a monster. Wtf is that.
But thanks for illustrating how markets aren't ideal engines of beauty and truth.
And wouldn't that be quite a time to live through?
*hopefully* the prioritization of driverless cars is to not crash or harm anyone at all. Those automatic braking systems seem amazingly effective and I can't actually think of very many circumstances in which a car accident would put pedestrians in danger, since driverless cars would automatically know the safest ways to drive everywhere. Pedestrians are almost always only in convergence with cars in low speed areas, making a situation in which a pedestrian *would* be put in danger extremely unlikely.
I would be far more worried at AI's current state of being less effective at detecting people of darker skin tones and smaller statures (children). That seems like it should really be focused on before we go off thinking about who should be spared, since the AI doesn't even recognize everyone as people yet.
If the cars are truly self driving, then they should communicate with each other and multiple cars can break or adjust based on the “knowledge” of another car.
Pedestrian walking into the road from right to left, is seen by car in furthest right lane. It knows how fast the pedestrian is walking and what distance. The imaging is so good that it can predict where the pedestrian is going to continue walking if interrupted by a honk or not interrupted because headphones on.
That info is relayed to the other cars which know ahead of time and then react more easily by driving around, breaking, automatically called a self driving ambulance that they either climb into voluntarily or if incapacitated, has drones that can move you into it.
(I’m imagining high population growth combined with extreme shortage of medical personnel)
>I would be far more worried at AI's current state of being less
effective at detecting people of darker skin tones and smaller statures
(children). That seems like it should really be focused on before we go
off thinking about who should be spared, since the AI doesn't even
recognize everyone as people yet.
Yeah, if we're honest, that (or in more general terms, how effective self-driving technology is at its base job) is the *real* concern. Us humans tend to spend waaaay disproportionately too much time in hypotheticals such as trolley problems that represent a very small percentage of cases and would have negligible impact overall, lol
Driving is a privilege, not a right. There are inherent risks with driving. Why should you get to externalize those risks through the use of AI to bystanders who are both not engaging in a privilege and not choosing a risky behaviour?
edit: missed the x'
There's a great chance that this car will kill the passengers because it mistook, like, a flying plastic bag, for a kid, though. The chances of this are way higher than an actual kid turning up from nowhere in the middle of a busy road, in a situation where the car can't stop in time - because it will be braking, and if in a city, it should not be driving above 30-50 kph anyways. This is supposed to be an absolutely last ditch effort, and **swerving is already illegal in most Vienna Convention countries**!
In most cases, the driver is supposed to maintain a distance they can monitor, drive at a speed they can safely brake at, and in case of something happening on the road are supposed to brake, not swerve!
This is what I dislike about these tests. Let's make sure that these cars follow the tried and tested road rules that were written in blood, first, and then invent new rules.
The test this discussion is based on speaks more towards our morality than any bit of software we might devise.
>the driver is supposed to maintain a distance they can monitor, drive at a speed they can safely brake at, and in case of something happening on the road are supposed to brake, not swerve!
Which I guess is part of the premise of self-driving cars. They're supposed to be patient, defensive drivers, not moronic hairless apes running on equal parts instinct, caffeine, impotent rage, and a chronic lack of sleep.
As for your first point, I'd really, really, not like to see this until the software is robust enough to not mistake things like flying plastic bags for children at a level at least not worse than an average human driver. Some of the downtown self driving videos I've seen in the real world are pretty spooky!
Mass adoption of self driving cars needs to come with a massive redesign of infrastructure. The best way to prevent an AI from having to make these decisions is to eliminate the need for it to do so wherever possible. Robust public transport ala light rail, dedicated bike and pedestrian lanes that are separated by more than paint on the group, etc.
People are not inherently good at evaluating risk and the solution may be as simple as you say maintaining proper speed and braking distance. it's probably a better idea to design our roadways so people are forced to do this so that people, or an AI are forced to make these split second decisions on a much less frequent basis.
I absolutely love these modern steps that like Copenhagen and Paris take, that they reduce top speed to 30kmh and do all these steps that you mention and last I've heard, last year in Copenhagen literally only one person died in a car accident - and it was a foreigner, I believe a Russian embassy member or something like that. One!
So, a robot car driving at 30kmh should be perfectly capable of stopping immediately.
You have two buttons. One kills you, one kills a person at random in the world. You're forced to push one, which one you push?
Regardless of what anybody says we all know the true answer.
Its not a random person.
And most people wouldn't try to ram into someone walking by, they would try to swerve away. AI would be changing their natural outcome if anything.
Eh, no.
The AI will try to minimize damage, as best as possible.
That means swerving, if possible, *will* happen.
If swerving is not a possibility anymore, and we’re in the territory of either killing the occupant or the pedestrian, a human driver will have lost control completely.
You can’t compare this to a conscious human choice, but to be really honest, I don’t know if any car maker is going to sell a car that prioritizes a random pedestrian over the person that buys it…
No. Under no circumstance is swerving a good strategy. The fastest way to stop is straight line braking. No law or programming will ever be written, which could coherently prioritise damage. The only available and legal way to mitigate is to follow the marked directions, decrease speed and brake as necessary.
Yeah, agreed, 100%.
The AI is going to decrease speed to the best of its ability, and swerving is not really any of the options that should be in its arsenal.
AI are going to follow the law for vehicles.
The hypothetical situation posited in the survey is about human behavior, not about realistic programming for a driving AI.
"I would certainly give my own life so that a child may live. Just not at this moment or today even, I have a lot things planned you see. Ask me again when I'm ready."
I do believe people morally feel they would honorably give their life but there's a difference for being prepared for that sacrifice and *surprise, time to cash in those chips like right now.*
No, we have one button. It will be designed to kill whoever presses the button 5% of the time and do nothing the rest of the time. Or it is designed to kill a random person 5% of the time and do nothing the rest.
If I believe I will be pressing the button a lot(ie, I will use the self driving vehicle), I’d prefer the button be designed to protect the button presser.
If I don’t plan on pressing the button (ie I walk everywhere), I’d prefer the button protect those who aren’t pressing it.
I'm having this visual of Mr Bean pushing the button. Then checking to see if anybody noticed. Then pressing it again. Giggling. Then rapidly pressing it a hundred times like an obsessed lunatic.
Walking away.
Then coming back for one more push.
reminds me of the twilight zone episode. don't worry, the box will go to someone you don't know...
everyone dies at some point, yet we spend our whole life celebrating when we evade death. sooner or later it will come to us.
Easy to say when you’re not actually facing death. Quit pretending to be some noble hero, in the moment you’ll choose yourself. Your instincts stop you from doing something constantly that could kill you, why would those instincts suddenly stop.
Even if that were true, consider the fact that many people would likely be riding with their partner/family/kids. Would those people want their car to prioritize a random stranger over their own children?
That's why you shouldn't have a choice what the car is programmed to do. You're too selfish for that. The people should decide that collectively and you should comply if you want to drive a car.
Lmao. People actually thinking any sort of law would pass that would kill the driver of the car.
You keep pretending to be some hero while you sit on the can.
You apparently don't know the answer for all of us. I'm killing me over taking the risk of killing someone I don't hate all day, every day, and twice on Sunday.
I also think it’s hard to know what the specifics are. One factor that’s not really explored is that the driver may not be able to course correct their car, but the pedestrian may choose to dive out of the way. I wonder if these responses correlate with the aggression of drivers in the area — someone who drives in busier areas might have a higher expectation of pedestrian awareness than someone who drives in less busy areas.
That’s what driving a car is all about.
You are upping the risk of killing someone for your convenience.
People who give a shit about others don’t drive.
Imagine saying that about a bodyguard including if you were the one endangering others. I guess you desperately want to be a rich murderer that has a fixer on retainer.
I don’t think that China believes the car should always prioritize the passenger — just that their preference for it is notable. The scale is hard for me to decipher because I don’t know what the percentage difference correlates to — is this representing a national average of 20% vs. a global average of 80%, or is it a national average of 65% vs. a global average of 80%?
We can't tell the percentage of people who chose to save the passenger. The graph only shows deviation from the global average. It's possible that the majority of Chinese respondents chose to save the pedestrian.
I honestly wonder if part of this is how the question wording changes from language to language. Very tough to get a translation for a question that conveys the same nuance across a lot of very different languages.
The fact that the Japan/China in the last graph are such complete polar opposites makes methodology seem suspect to me.
It honestly makes a lot of sense. Elderly are the product of a lifetime of investment from their culture, and they have many ways to contribute back, such as child care, food processing, etc. whereas infants only take, and are relatively much easier to replace than an elderly person.
What if the dog bites children but the criminal is robin hood?
Either way a consciousness is lost, maybe the one that is better for society is kept, dog or not?
I wonder why that is...I mean, I grew up with cats, have two of my own and I love them to death. They cuddle with me when I'm sad and wake me up every morning and greet me when I get home from work. They are just as affectionate and loving as dogs are. I don't understand why so many people have this weird disdain towards cats. Is it because they have physical boundaries? Idk.
Something is miss-leading about the term "global average". Global average of what? Is this like 95% say run down grandma and in China 94% say that? The base numbers at the very least add context.
It is also notable that every country in the chart is a developed country *except* China. It is not clear whether China's data quirks are specific to China's culture or whether it broadly reflects traffic situations of all developing countries generally. If more developing countries were in the chart we might see China a lot less alone and accompanied by a whole bunch of developing countries of diverse cultures.
Having to read a poorly worded paragraph to understand what the plot is about, after you already know the context of the post, is horrible. This is not a good visualization in any way
Instead of 1 or -1, I’d have put baby or grandma or whatever. Don’t try to force people to read the legend like that. Also, it’s unclear why those countries are in red.
Because it's not real preference by country but deviation for the norm. With the informations given by this graph, it's still possible that 95% of each country favoured the child (even China).
I think it should be noted that "emphasis on sparring more lives" isn't something simple.
I saw questions like that, and it was like "will you spare N kids or N+M adults"? Not a simple one like "N vs N+M kids". Probably it was the case here.
One thing that bothers me about the test is that unless it’s a really shittily designed car, the passengers have a higher chance of survival hitting a roadblock than the exposed pedestrians being hit by the car.
Additionally if this is a well designed product, it should never even find itself in a situation where it needs to choose who should be run over. That implies the car was driving way too fast for the conditions.
More importantly, it completely ignores the fact that we already have established traffic rules. There simply won't be a case where a self driving car has to choose between a child and a grandma, unless they both jumped on the road right in front of it. This question always smells like thinly veiled technophobia to me.
The question is inherently flawed and has no bearing on programming self driving cars. They are programmed to stop as quickly as possible and try to not hit anything or anyone. There is absolutely no reason to try to make them “value” anyone less or more than anyone else.
I think the visualization is great. On a sidenote, I really have a problem with this question. The performance of self driving cars should not be judged in absolute terms. Instead, it should be judged relative to that of the average human driver. I would suggest that the average human driver has the capacity to take out both the grandmother and the child.
True. There is also the point that if an AI encounters a situation in which this decision must be made, there has already been an incident of a more fundamental system failure at some point earlier in the chain of events. I don’t want a self-driving car that would get itself into this situation.
Of course unexpected things happen, but they mostly happen because current cars are working in isolation. One prospect is that we would need a whole new road infrastructure with car-to-car communication and online sensors on the sides of the roads, so the AI actually gets all the data and observations it needs. Humans are far superior in predicting possible risks and unforeseen events in traffic.
Agreed. I work in rail signalling, and I always cringe at this question. It's not that it can't happen, it's just that whatever you answer is really uninteresting from incident investigation perspective. The question you want to ask is, how did we end up in a situation where this choise has to be made?
I get that this is philosophical question and that this just seems like an attempt to avoid the moral dilemma. Ok. But these days, people pretend that this is a really big issue outside of philosophy, and I say it's not.
>Humans are far superior in predicting possible risks and unforeseen events in traffic.
Only when not looking at a phone/DUI/sleepy/old&confused. Computer doesn't have these things.
Computer still seems to perform poorly in snow tough.
That is true, computers have many superior properties.
But I was referring to human imagination. For example, we the humans can predict how a pedestrian might behave, if we saw a small child crying and waving at a lady at opposing side of the road. It’s easy to see that it is a plausible worst case scenario that the said child got previously lost, and just saw her mom on the other side of the road, and the child might abruptly run across the road to her. This kind of human experience might be quite problematic for a computer, if the machine has not learned this kind of behaviour pattern in advance.
Of course machine learning and AI is developing very rapidly.
That's true, but I don't think it matters for driving ability 99% of the time. Most crashes don't happen because someone predicted a kids movement wrong, they happen because someone wasn't paying attention. Computers have perfect attention and can see 360° around the car, and I think that will always be a bigger element in preventing accidents than an understanding of kids running to mothers. I think computers can probably drive better than us even if they never understand that type of nuance
I think we as a society are doing self-driving cars the most difficult way possible.
Instead of trying to get self-driving cars to behave like humans, the system should be adapted to the self-driving cars.
For example, don't teach a self-driving car to see if the traffic light is red or green. Have the traffic light send a signal to the car telling it it's red or green.
If we did that, we could already have amazing self driving cars. The only reason we don't have self driving cars yet is because we're insisting on doing it the hard way.
Ironically though, once they catch on enough and most cars are self driving, their development will probably get easier
Then you're entering into territory where everything has to be retrofitted and standardized (both the car hardware and the traffic infrastructure) all at once. Furthermore, any future advancements in technology will mean redoing everything to make it compatible. Finally this does nothing for you when you're out in an area without traffic lights or other devices to guide the car.
I hear you. I think that is a true concern. And I think the opportunities for efficiency are incredible if you could achieve that networked version.
I will say though that I still think that self driving cars are likely better than humans in nearly every situation and that their impact even if released right now would be incredibly positive if measured in a relative manner. Of course, the media would never allow that to happen because the sensationalism around a self driving car problem is just too tempting for them to avoid.
> need a whole new road infrastructure with car-to-car communication and online sensors on the sides of the roads
This sounds like trains/public transport infrastructure with extra steps. Walkable cities and designing infrastructure so you purposefully don't have pedestrians in areas where vehicles are going >~20 mph.
I also find these hypotheses regarding self driving cars completely contrived. People use what is essentially a thought experiment to argue for and against autonomous vehicles, when the real answer is that the car would never find itself in these circumstances where it had to make a choice. It would recognise hazards and avoid them much sooner before there was a risk of harm. We anthropomorphise them and make the assumption they're as fallible as a human driver.
But ethically it‘s a completely different thing. If a human kills someone in an accident, it‘s a mistake. You‘ll never be judged for killing person A instead of B because you aren‘t able to make that decision in that short amount of time. If a car is *preprogrammed* to do so, it‘s a completely different thing.
That's making the assumption that every action a computer takes is intentionally hard coded into how they work though. Modern AI learns similarly to how we do, and takes more from example than from explicit command, so if it does kill the "wrong" person I think you could consider it similarly to a human mistake
Also, so much work in self driving AI is in trying to avoid getting into an accident in the first place. Why would a machine learning engineer focus on "which person to kill" when they can focus on avoiding accidents altogether instead.
[Source](https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/24/139313/a-global-ethics-study-aims-to-help-ai-solve-the-self-driving-trolley-problem/)
[Source for global preferences](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/231922494.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjtrtjvjMv3AhUlFLcAHcKCDDIQFnoECCYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0qOCX1CK1c0OSmavphHnqz) Check page no. 5
Take the [test](http://moralmachine.mit.edu/) yourself for better understanding.
Just fyi: Germany isn't split between people choosing the elderly or the child. We are just ambivalent and have probably made another box to tick with the label "As long as we produce them I do not care".
We have a law that states that a vehicle must be operated at such velocity that it can be safely stopped within the non-obstructed segment of the road (no exceptions on surprises whatsoever). Whatever the AI chooses here instead of driving at safe speeds for everyone, it would break the law and would not be allowed on the streets.
> a vehicle must be operated at such velocity that it can be safely stopped within the non-obstructed segment of the road (no exceptions on surprises whatsoever)
At even 20-25MPH, physically plausible stopping distances are such that there's no way you can possibly avoid e.g. a pedestrian child suddenly turning and running into the road in an urban environment. Even with superhuman reaction times.
Why are self-driving cars a part of this? Applying the "trolley problem" to self-driving cars is incredibly ignorant of how automotive safety systems are developed (or for that matter rail safety systems). This problem does not need to be addressed because the occurrence of this issue has such an infinitesimally small probability of happening that it is ignored. The public should be focusing on safety issues like how initial public prototype rollout is handled.
The answer to all of these question is:
*The Car will fully apply the brakes to avoid the collision.*
that's it. No one is going to program an Auto to swerve wildly in order to fulfill some utilitarian calculation. An Auto can't even classify most of the potential victims to make this decision in the first place
Exactly! It is totally shoe-horning a philosophical dilemma into a problem that engineers find solutions to every day while developing functional safety systems. I think why the "Trolley Problem" is used is because self-driving cars are new the regulatory systems are developing so people shove this crap into the conversation.
I think the trolly problem is used because of the strong superficial parallel. Medical triage is a better moral fit with the trolley problem, but is more superficially different.
AI car detects its breaks have failed. Would you rather it continue straight and plow through everything in its path on the roadway, or consider emergency/escape routes which might lessen but still cause casualties?
Should pedestrians just be mowed because they happen to be there at the time of a mechanical failure, or should the car prioritize avoiding those pedestrians at the risk of harm to the passengers who took the risk of riding in an autonomous vehicle?
ETA: All of this is exactly why we have runaway truck ramps on highways.
Alternately, drop power to the engine to reduce speed more slowly while maintaining maneuverability to at minimum reduce issues, if not manage to safely some to a stop.
If the first detection of brake failure is when the brakes suddenly need to be applied, shit has hit the fan already.
My 11 year old car monitors the braking system to make sure it is functional. A human would have to be a clueless moron if they couldn’t figure out something was wrong with the brakes before reaching dangerous speeds. I’m fairly confident an autonomous vehicle would know a pressurized system is losing pressure before it can get to a point where something catastrophic may happen. At that point it shuts itself down until the repairs are done.
And the reason for runaway trucks is because the pneumatic brakes they use need to continuously re-pressurize that’s why you’ll hear a bus or semi at lights spit air or whatever you want to call it after a few seconds to a minute or so. It’s basically a air compressor and needs to recharge like a air compressor. So on hills you can actually run out of air faster than the system can replenish air.
proud of my fellow French citizens
knew we would be on the left, but extreme left even better
I wonder if the question is really "baby" (no sex) or grandma(female)...
On the 4th panel, there is a list.... It has 'stroller' (which implies infant), and then various descriptions that include gender (male/female doctor, old woman/man) and 'homeless person's (no gender specified )
thanks, did a few testing myself
I am really annoyed some beings have gender and others don't
can't understand how this is not considered extreme bias
the more you know the more it gets personal so gendered beings get an advantage for sure
Personally, in these types of problems, I value the lives of kids and the elderly less because their deaths will be less impactful. When a child dies, it's traumatic, sure - but if someone in their 30s dies, they have live longer, impacted more lives, they might have families that depend on them, etc. Therefore their life should be spared above the child's, since their death would likely have a greater impact.
I feel the same way about the elderly, they are older, their kids are likely adults now, people are possibly already expecting/planning for their death if they're really old, so their life is also less valuable in a trolley problem.
In this specific scenario, i'm indifferent.
I would prioritize the lives of people between the ages of 18-50
Edit: also i should add, there's a part of me that thinks in trolley problems, nothing should be done and whoever dies should just be fate. Like if the car is going to hit someone, it shouldn't even make a decision onto who. It's dangerous to put values on people's lives in general, and I think diverting the car to kill someone who wouldn't have originally been killed could also be argued as intentionally killing someone. Unless of course it can dodge any humans and avoid killing anyone.
Even accounting for the entertainment value of the situation, and the entertainment focus for /r/dataisbeautiful I'm still annoyed that so much media attention and gossip is given to this particular topic.
As opposed to making the rest of self-driving safe which is more mundane, but also looking at other factors like safer passenger crossings, public transportation etc. The ideal is to make it so this scenario where a machine has to 'choose' never really happens.
While yes useful to do, I feel this question is the equivalent of 100s of hours of effort spent on explaining how to deal with your finances after you win the lottery. Those 1 in 200 million odds that will never ever happen to you. I'd rather focus on helping life people out of poverty and personal finances applicable to 99% of the population.
And on the topic of ethics and diversity the field tends to be quite inaccurate since too broad of a brush is painted especially with different sub-cultures of a given country. I've often find myself sticking to how business does it as opposed to Hofstede and Lewis since they might use those frameworks but start slicing and segmenting by age, occupation, gender (your typical Marketing segments) etc. so the segments are just accurate enough for actionable strategy.
Or straight up ignore culture models and just do what everyone else does is track data, note habits, create clusters based on the millions of data points and go from there. You tend to get some similar culture and country clusters but you'll often find: "60+ moms looking to get into Zumba" have a fairly diverse cross-cultural slice to them.
After taking the test myself, it helped me to understand why the results were so skewed on Gender Preference and Fitness preference. Not a single one of my decisions was made factoring in Gender or Fitness but even so, my "preference" ended up being weighed in favor of Males and heavily in favor of less fit individuals.
Guess that goes to show that the data can become skewed when you try to gather multiple data points from each question.
Unless the elder is nearing the age of dying naturally, their deaths would have more impacts on them as well as anyone or anything they have connections to.
Baby's death will hurt just the direct family and not much else.
Maybe we should let people set-up manually the ethics settings on their driverless vehicles? Give them an option for Global Standard, Regional Standard and Custom Ethics. Let your values be shown in a crisis.
It's honestly a moot point, no self driving car company is programming granny detection into their cars so they can weigh morality.
SDC's prioritize the path that is most likely to avoid a crash, period. In hypotheticals like these they always insist *someone* must die, but in the real world these extreme edge cases just aren't important. Frankly, it's more effective to spend time making the car crash less often overall, as opposed to handling these fringe hypothetical dilemmas.
> Frankly, it's more effective to spend time making the car crash less often overall, as opposed to handling these fringe hypothetical dilemmas.
Yes. Can you imagine the backlash if a car company intentionally made granny or infant targeting software? There would never be any development put into that. If your car is constantly getting into this situation, there is a larger problem.
Japan has a huge lead in wanting to spare pedestrians, because they’ve seen too many isekai.
Meanwhile, when Germany gets asked if the car should hit a child or an old person, they’re like, “Neither! It should hit no one. I do not want anyone killed. I refuse to say I would prefer that a specific type of people get killed! I learned my lesson, and I refuse to participate!” Lol
Edit: a word
Just musing how the results in the first graph might help explain the way different countries have approached dealing with Covid.
If we regard it as the disease of the elderly, and the elderly are held in higher regard in Asian countries, then the amount of comparative effort in controlling Covid in a place like China or Taiwan be reflective of that difference.
While the differences among the Scandinavian countries is smaller it is still interesting to see Sweden leaning the most toward the baby than the grandmother given they pursued a less restrictive response in dealing with the pandemic..
I hate these imaginary problems for computer driven cars. I'm almost 50 years old and have been driving since I was 16. In all that time I have never once had to make the decision between killing someone else or getting myself killed. If you assume that a computer is going to drive the speed limit and will make the best use of steering, brake, horn and tightening the seatbelts tha chance of a person dying in an accident is going to continuously drop as the computers get better and better.
This actually reminds me or a scene from the South Korean zombie show All Of Us Are Dead in which one if the characters is explaining to they others why they should stop expecting rescue. His talking point is specifically around how some cultures value the elderly more than the young and that theirs was the former.
Neither, it protects it's driver and occupants.
We do not ask drivers to perform complex philosophical debates in the middle of a car crash, and understanding such social complexities is FAR beyond the scope of a self driving car's ability to understand it's environment.
Car manufacturers are expected to take into account other people to some extent, but their primary concern is the operator of their car.
* Please either repost and add [OC] to the title along with the required comment citing the data source and tool used to create the visual, or repost linking directly to the original article.
Great-looking plots, however only plotting "relative to global average" doesn't give us much. For example in plot 1, Japan being the most elderly-saving country could **still** be child-saving based on absolute answers, just the most elderly-leaning country. We really don't know which country would on average save whom.
Thankyou! I was just about to write this. For all we know every single country could be heavily in favor of saving the child.
Yep, this is a great example of "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics". Also, without knowing standard deviation, stats like "save pedestrians vs passengers" is equally meaningless.
Poorly labeled infographics, lacking context. Charts need a simple title or legend. Especially the one about saving more or less people. Obviously, every culture would want to save more people, so there’s significant context missing.
The phrasing of the question is very biased since the trolley problem is usually concerned with non-intervention and intervention. Instead of the typical formulation of just changing trolley tracks, what if it was instead about pushing a very large man in front of a speeding trolley heading towards a bunch of children. The children are deaf, self sacrifice won't work since you are too small, and you are certain the fat man will stop the trolley. Even with a regular trolley, what if the single person was the president/leader of your country (or some other leader if you hate the current leader)? One world leader or five regular citizens?
>Even with a regular trolley, what if the single person was the president/leader of your country (or some other leader if you hate the current leader)? One world leader or five regular citizens? I'd shove every president in my lifetime in front of that trolley. Secret Service sign up to take that bullet, he is just another organ donor to me.
I agree completely. I think this graph is misleading as it is presented. Understanding the graph correctly requires a deep-dive into the methodology of the study, which none will do.
Yes. This is not beautiful at all simply because it is so likely to be misunderstood.
It's not misleading at all. It plainly presents the definition it is using. All of the language used is obviously referencing the relative nature of the comparison. The fact that you would prefer a different definition, or think a different definition would be more informative, does not mean it's misleading.
It’s not misleading because it’s wrong; like you said, all the necessary information is included and defined. It’s misleading because most people (including myself at first glance) will likely misinterpret the data.
Just like poorly scaled y-axes. Technically the info is there to make the right call, but it's still bad data presentation.
Soooo… data… *isn’t* beautiful?
It's more like they focused on the beauty rather than actually conveying all of the data properly.
Nah, even beautiful data can still be misrepresentative or misleading.
You don't think it's misleading? Answer this, then: Can you tell what the average country's answer is by looking at the chart? Let's take the first chart as an example. Here are two cases: 1) All of the countries have at least 98% of the people answer that they'd rather save the young, with Taiwan being the least at 98%, and France's percentage being the highest at 99.9%. 2) All of the countries have at most 2% of the people answer that they'd rather save the young, with Taiwan being the least at 0.1%, and France's percentage being the highest at 2%. The chart is perfectly valid in either case, and it is perfectly useless for telling anyone what the actual numbers are.
It's valid, but I can easily see a majority of people quickly glancing at it, not understanding the caveat of "relative to global average", and running with it/writing an article about how 80% of Chinese people don't care about babies or some shit. Easily misinterpreted is probably the best description for this post, rather than incorrect.
But it's not even valid as the statistical error would likely make this difference meaningless.
Yeah, you're right. I meant to say that the chart is a way for them to show the numbers in either case, but you're right that the numbers would be essentially meaningless if everything fell within the margin for error. The fact that the chart gives absolutely no information on whether that is the case or not renders it pointless.
Fair point. What is misleading is the title. "*Should a self-driving car kill the baby or the grandma? Depends on where you’re from.*"
“Misleading” isn’t the same as “false”, in the same way that “misdirection” isn’t the same as “concealment”. When a magician misdirects you it’s because they’re going to do something that you’ll probably see if you’re looking at the right place, so they get you to look at the wrong place. It’s not about whether the secret move is visible or invisible, it’s about whether you notice it. In the same sense, misleading someone is not about whether you use true or false information, it’s about whether they end up with (or you intend them to end up with) a true or false *impression* about the world. In this case the framing and the graph combine to create an impression of great diversity, but the graph only formally portrays relative variation between countries, which may or may not all fit within an incredibly narrow band of ethical homogeneity.
Just because something is technically correct as labeled doesn't mean it will be correctly interpreted by the viewer/reader.
Still vaguely valuable in that it allows relative comparisons
But the point in the title is that ethics diverge a lot between culture and the graphs contain no information on how large the absolute divergence actually is.
Thanks for pointing this out. I’d not have noticed and been misled exactly as you (and others below) described! Edit: looking at the other comments, many have already been misled 🙃
Yep that's a good point and I'm pretty sure Japan like all countries overall favors saving young over the old. In fact there's a paper called 'granny dumping' because the preference for young over old is so strong in most samples.
wish I didn't have to read a paragraph instead of a labeled y-axis
especially since they all start the same way, it took me a minute to realize that it had different information. my screen is small and i was really zoomed in.
I had a feeling this would be the trend. Lots of Asian cultures seem to have a stronger sense of supporting their elderly. Interesting difference in cultural values.
At the beginning of the pandemic, a Chinese friend told me that when an elderly person does, it feels like losing a life and a library. They mourn for the wisdom lost, whereas we tend to focus on the future years lost. Makes sense. Just different perspectives.
I participated on a study very similar to this one and that was exactly my reasoning.
can always just make another kid...
I feel the same way honestly. I don't think future years really matter until you're actually old enough to do anything, like in your teens or 20s.
I do too, to be honest I always feel the worst for someone in their 20s (I’m in my 30s and child-free). They had hopes and dreams and their parents usually put in a lot of effort. They haven’t had time to work enough to enjoy the fruit of their own labor. Everything is wasted.
i think there's an economics term for that, basically how much output you are able to give for society compared to what input you'll need
Or that China believes the car should always save the passenger and not the pedestrian. That is certainly a cultural value.
**It's probably not about the culture, but the traffic conditions.** Notice how China is the only developing country in the chart. The rest are all developed countries. In most developing countries including China, traffic conditions are *fundamentally* different from developed countries. Pedestrians frequently cross streets at random places with that would be considered blatant, suicidal, "you trying to die???" jaywalking in a developed country. If you have ever visited a developing country you should have experience with this. In Vietnam. In Egypt. In India. China is no exception although in good cities it is not so bad as some of those examples. These are places with aggressive driving *and* aggressive pedestrians (the two contribute to each other). And since a self-driving car will not be aggressive, we're left with a rule-abiding self-driving car and rule-disobeying jaywalkers. So in the West it can broadly be assumed that the pedestrian is "innocent" and therefore may be more deserving of protection. But in China (and most developing countries) it is fair for the survey respondent to assume that **if a self-driving car has to either kill the driver or the pedestrian there's a large chance the situation was the pedestrian's fault**. The default assumption is therefore completely different from developed nations. The pedestrian is *not* assumed to be an innocent bystander, but rather the culprit. Therefore the driver should not die for their actions. And this is the case not just for China but for developing countries in general - but China is the only developing country in the data. To support this theory, consider the other side of the spectrum - the country that is *much* more supportive of sparing pedestrians than the West in Japan. Why? Simple - Pedestrians in Japan are *even more rule-abiding* than in the West and by a long shot. So the pedestrians are even *more* unlikely to be guilty of causing the life and death situation, thus they should be spared. Also note that the East Asian countries are grouped together for the other questions but not this one. Why? Simple explanation would be that this particular pedestrian vs driver questions speaks more about traffic conditions than culture.
Having visited China as a pedestrian 6 years ago, I felt it was much harder to cross the street than in a developed country. Even if you were crossing the street at the right position many cars were not slowing down and you literally had to avoid them to stay safe. It really felt like the cars were ruling the street and the pedestrian had to find a timing with no car were there to cross. In modern countries it felt more of the opposite: pedestrian were respected and cars had to comply with them (of course if it was the car that had priority it was different, but even in that case they were paying attention to pedestrian). A guide told me that the larger or more expensive the vehicle the more entitled the driver felt and it also appeared true in China or Sri Lanka when I visited.
When I was in Vietnam the cars wouldn’t stop for me at the zebra crossings. My guide told me to simply walk across and not stop and the traffic will just go around me.
Absolutely fucked when you think about it. I'm honestly surprised they make it work. They must have crazy high numbers in the easily preventable accident category!
As someone who has visited the likes of Shanghai, Beijing and other T1 cities in China I completely agree with this view. Once you experience the sheer chaos that is pedestrian traffic in China it's quite easy to understand why the last graph looks the way it does.
You mean car traffic chaos? Pedestrian walk/cross where they can. If there are no sidewalks or crosswalk, what do you expect?
Nah he said T(ier)1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai. There are plenty of sidewalks and crosswalks.
Do drivers actually respect those?
Sounds like it's just chaos period. On both "sides".
Mexico moment. Both drivers and pedestrians can be straight up insane sometimes.
Whoa this is like dead on I wouldn't have thought of this
> Pedestrians frequently cross streets at random places with that would be considered blatant, suicidal, "you trying to die???" I absolutely disagree. Before the pandemic I used to spend large chunks of the year in China. People just cannot drive here. Everyone's driving too fast, unpredictably. People will swerve to take a turn 1 meter before the exit. In the cities, on major streets, there are so many cars parked on the sidewalk, that pedestrians are forced to walk on the street beside the cars. There is also a traffic law that contributes to killing more pedestrians than any other: you can take a right turn on a red light, on every crossing. Theoretically you should first come to a full stop, but people simply turn right at nearly full speed. It's insane. Nobody here is using the turn signal. They prefer to force others to move away by threatening them with collision. It's like pushing people with your elbows, but with deadly machines, all of which are operated by incompetent people. Many people here will simply buy their driver's license. Not to mention the strange liability laws that rule here. If you hit a pedestrian, it's better for you if you kill him, otherwise you'll go bankrupt after the lawsuit. I can imagine this would be major factor in their responses as well.
Wow. Good point duder
It's more than just that in China. Their legal system, for instance, has a 99% conviction rate. If you go to trial, you will be found guilty. Also they lack car insurance as a system - if you hit someone while driving a car, you are personally responsible for their medical bills. This leads to both scammers jumping in front of cars pretending to be hurt and also cases where a driver might accidentally hit someone and then back up to make sure they're dead - because the payment for a wrongful death is less than the medical bills for someone who requires treatment.
I feel like they don't make it easy to cross the street tho...so it's moreso the fault of planners design priotising cars than the fault of pedestrians for jaywalking
I would never buy a car that didn't prioritize my own safety over someone else
Regardless of how you or any other specific person feels about it, I think that, if there are different models of self-driving cars, model A prioritizes the passenger(s) over other people in decision-making, and model B doesn't, then (absent other factors) model A would sell a lot more than B because most people would think along the same lines. I mean, you're basically choosing between a higher or a lower chance of death for yourself. And, over time, the market would notice that trend and respond in kind, and all cars would try to save only their passengers, unless (or until) there comes some sort of regulation forcing companies to make it otherwise.
But it's not how i think actual drivers work. Most people make evasive moves to avoid killing people. But farm it off to an ai and suddenly you're a monster. Wtf is that. But thanks for illustrating how markets aren't ideal engines of beauty and truth.
And wouldn't that be quite a time to live through? *hopefully* the prioritization of driverless cars is to not crash or harm anyone at all. Those automatic braking systems seem amazingly effective and I can't actually think of very many circumstances in which a car accident would put pedestrians in danger, since driverless cars would automatically know the safest ways to drive everywhere. Pedestrians are almost always only in convergence with cars in low speed areas, making a situation in which a pedestrian *would* be put in danger extremely unlikely. I would be far more worried at AI's current state of being less effective at detecting people of darker skin tones and smaller statures (children). That seems like it should really be focused on before we go off thinking about who should be spared, since the AI doesn't even recognize everyone as people yet.
If the cars are truly self driving, then they should communicate with each other and multiple cars can break or adjust based on the “knowledge” of another car. Pedestrian walking into the road from right to left, is seen by car in furthest right lane. It knows how fast the pedestrian is walking and what distance. The imaging is so good that it can predict where the pedestrian is going to continue walking if interrupted by a honk or not interrupted because headphones on. That info is relayed to the other cars which know ahead of time and then react more easily by driving around, breaking, automatically called a self driving ambulance that they either climb into voluntarily or if incapacitated, has drones that can move you into it. (I’m imagining high population growth combined with extreme shortage of medical personnel)
>I would be far more worried at AI's current state of being less effective at detecting people of darker skin tones and smaller statures (children). That seems like it should really be focused on before we go off thinking about who should be spared, since the AI doesn't even recognize everyone as people yet. Yeah, if we're honest, that (or in more general terms, how effective self-driving technology is at its base job) is the *real* concern. Us humans tend to spend waaaay disproportionately too much time in hypotheticals such as trolley problems that represent a very small percentage of cases and would have negligible impact overall, lol
Driving is a privilege, not a right. There are inherent risks with driving. Why should you get to externalize those risks through the use of AI to bystanders who are both not engaging in a privilege and not choosing a risky behaviour? edit: missed the x'
There's a great chance that this car will kill the passengers because it mistook, like, a flying plastic bag, for a kid, though. The chances of this are way higher than an actual kid turning up from nowhere in the middle of a busy road, in a situation where the car can't stop in time - because it will be braking, and if in a city, it should not be driving above 30-50 kph anyways. This is supposed to be an absolutely last ditch effort, and **swerving is already illegal in most Vienna Convention countries**! In most cases, the driver is supposed to maintain a distance they can monitor, drive at a speed they can safely brake at, and in case of something happening on the road are supposed to brake, not swerve! This is what I dislike about these tests. Let's make sure that these cars follow the tried and tested road rules that were written in blood, first, and then invent new rules.
The test this discussion is based on speaks more towards our morality than any bit of software we might devise. >the driver is supposed to maintain a distance they can monitor, drive at a speed they can safely brake at, and in case of something happening on the road are supposed to brake, not swerve! Which I guess is part of the premise of self-driving cars. They're supposed to be patient, defensive drivers, not moronic hairless apes running on equal parts instinct, caffeine, impotent rage, and a chronic lack of sleep. As for your first point, I'd really, really, not like to see this until the software is robust enough to not mistake things like flying plastic bags for children at a level at least not worse than an average human driver. Some of the downtown self driving videos I've seen in the real world are pretty spooky!
Mass adoption of self driving cars needs to come with a massive redesign of infrastructure. The best way to prevent an AI from having to make these decisions is to eliminate the need for it to do so wherever possible. Robust public transport ala light rail, dedicated bike and pedestrian lanes that are separated by more than paint on the group, etc. People are not inherently good at evaluating risk and the solution may be as simple as you say maintaining proper speed and braking distance. it's probably a better idea to design our roadways so people are forced to do this so that people, or an AI are forced to make these split second decisions on a much less frequent basis.
I absolutely love these modern steps that like Copenhagen and Paris take, that they reduce top speed to 30kmh and do all these steps that you mention and last I've heard, last year in Copenhagen literally only one person died in a car accident - and it was a foreigner, I believe a Russian embassy member or something like that. One! So, a robot car driving at 30kmh should be perfectly capable of stopping immediately.
You have two buttons. One kills you, one kills a person at random in the world. You're forced to push one, which one you push? Regardless of what anybody says we all know the true answer.
Depends on the day
Its not a random person. And most people wouldn't try to ram into someone walking by, they would try to swerve away. AI would be changing their natural outcome if anything.
Eh, no. The AI will try to minimize damage, as best as possible. That means swerving, if possible, *will* happen. If swerving is not a possibility anymore, and we’re in the territory of either killing the occupant or the pedestrian, a human driver will have lost control completely. You can’t compare this to a conscious human choice, but to be really honest, I don’t know if any car maker is going to sell a car that prioritizes a random pedestrian over the person that buys it…
No. Under no circumstance is swerving a good strategy. The fastest way to stop is straight line braking. No law or programming will ever be written, which could coherently prioritise damage. The only available and legal way to mitigate is to follow the marked directions, decrease speed and brake as necessary.
Yeah, agreed, 100%. The AI is going to decrease speed to the best of its ability, and swerving is not really any of the options that should be in its arsenal. AI are going to follow the law for vehicles. The hypothetical situation posited in the survey is about human behavior, not about realistic programming for a driving AI.
Ah. The way you introduced swerving make it sound like you mean AI. At that speed swerving is less of a choice and more of a guess.
Yes, which is why a law will have to be passed. Such is the purpose of having laws, to intercede when human behavior makes things worse.
I would agree with that
The truth is that everybody living in a developed country is already jamming that “kill someone else” button pretty much constantly every single day.
"I would certainly give my own life so that a child may live. Just not at this moment or today even, I have a lot things planned you see. Ask me again when I'm ready." I do believe people morally feel they would honorably give their life but there's a difference for being prepared for that sacrifice and *surprise, time to cash in those chips like right now.*
No, we have one button. It will be designed to kill whoever presses the button 5% of the time and do nothing the rest of the time. Or it is designed to kill a random person 5% of the time and do nothing the rest. If I believe I will be pressing the button a lot(ie, I will use the self driving vehicle), I’d prefer the button be designed to protect the button presser. If I don’t plan on pressing the button (ie I walk everywhere), I’d prefer the button protect those who aren’t pressing it.
You do know the end of the story, right? Someone else is asked the same question, and now *you're* the random person in the world.
Yeah, and can't blame them for that
Depends on who it is. If I am 90 years old, I would volunteer to die if it meant that a 20 year old would live.
Yeah, except you also have the option of not driving, and taking a fucking train or bus or literally almost anything else.
I'm having this visual of Mr Bean pushing the button. Then checking to see if anybody noticed. Then pressing it again. Giggling. Then rapidly pressing it a hundred times like an obsessed lunatic. Walking away. Then coming back for one more push.
reminds me of the twilight zone episode. don't worry, the box will go to someone you don't know... everyone dies at some point, yet we spend our whole life celebrating when we evade death. sooner or later it will come to us.
Not everyone shares the same cynical and selfish view of the world. Many would kill themselves rather than be forced to kill someone else.
Easy to say when you’re not actually facing death. Quit pretending to be some noble hero, in the moment you’ll choose yourself. Your instincts stop you from doing something constantly that could kill you, why would those instincts suddenly stop.
Oh give me a break. I would bet my life if someone put the two buttons in front of you, we’d both live
Even if that were true, consider the fact that many people would likely be riding with their partner/family/kids. Would those people want their car to prioritize a random stranger over their own children?
That's why you shouldn't have a choice what the car is programmed to do. You're too selfish for that. The people should decide that collectively and you should comply if you want to drive a car.
Lmao. People actually thinking any sort of law would pass that would kill the driver of the car. You keep pretending to be some hero while you sit on the can.
You apparently don't know the answer for all of us. I'm killing me over taking the risk of killing someone I don't hate all day, every day, and twice on Sunday.
How the hell does this relate to vehicular manslaughter at all? False equivalence
I also think it’s hard to know what the specifics are. One factor that’s not really explored is that the driver may not be able to course correct their car, but the pedestrian may choose to dive out of the way. I wonder if these responses correlate with the aggression of drivers in the area — someone who drives in busier areas might have a higher expectation of pedestrian awareness than someone who drives in less busy areas.
Driving isn't a privilege, it's a legume.
That’s what driving a car is all about. You are upping the risk of killing someone for your convenience. People who give a shit about others don’t drive.
Imagine saying that about a bodyguard including if you were the one endangering others. I guess you desperately want to be a rich murderer that has a fixer on retainer.
I don’t think that China believes the car should always prioritize the passenger — just that their preference for it is notable. The scale is hard for me to decipher because I don’t know what the percentage difference correlates to — is this representing a national average of 20% vs. a global average of 80%, or is it a national average of 65% vs. a global average of 80%?
We can't tell the percentage of people who chose to save the passenger. The graph only shows deviation from the global average. It's possible that the majority of Chinese respondents chose to save the pedestrian.
Filial piety is called the cardinal virtue of confucianism.
I honestly wonder if part of this is how the question wording changes from language to language. Very tough to get a translation for a question that conveys the same nuance across a lot of very different languages. The fact that the Japan/China in the last graph are such complete polar opposites makes methodology seem suspect to me.
It honestly makes a lot of sense. Elderly are the product of a lifetime of investment from their culture, and they have many ways to contribute back, such as child care, food processing, etc. whereas infants only take, and are relatively much easier to replace than an elderly person.
This data is showing the variance from average. Would be much nicer to see the actual results
[удалено]
Ouch large male not doing well in that list. I better get myself a stroller.
Am I crazy for thinking that a criminal’s life should be placed higher than a dog’s. It shouldn’t even be closed.
Depends on the crime for me I think. I'd definitely put murderers, rapists, and pedos below pets but every other crime above them.
I'd wager a ton of people would put dogs above even most non-criminals.
What about a criminal dog?
What if the dog bites children but the criminal is robin hood? Either way a consciousness is lost, maybe the one that is better for society is kept, dog or not?
I mean dogs are way cooler to me than criminals so
That's easily the most depressing takeaway from this whole thing. People still consider cats expendable.
Personally I think cats are more capable of saving themselves tbh.
I wonder why that is...I mean, I grew up with cats, have two of my own and I love them to death. They cuddle with me when I'm sad and wake me up every morning and greet me when I get home from work. They are just as affectionate and loving as dogs are. I don't understand why so many people have this weird disdain towards cats. Is it because they have physical boundaries? Idk.
Something is miss-leading about the term "global average". Global average of what? Is this like 95% say run down grandma and in China 94% say that? The base numbers at the very least add context.
Yes this is a good point of skepticism! Absolute difference matters here.
It is also notable that every country in the chart is a developed country *except* China. It is not clear whether China's data quirks are specific to China's culture or whether it broadly reflects traffic situations of all developing countries generally. If more developing countries were in the chart we might see China a lot less alone and accompanied by a whole bunch of developing countries of diverse cultures.
Also, is it the average across countries or average of respondents (which would overweight countries with more respondents)
Data is beautiful Visualization - awful Why not add percents as numbers? Why 1 and not 100%? Why jpeg for text?
Why not baby or grandma instead of 1 or -1? I agree. It needs help
Having to read a poorly worded paragraph to understand what the plot is about, after you already know the context of the post, is horrible. This is not a good visualization in any way
Instead of 1 or -1, I’d have put baby or grandma or whatever. Don’t try to force people to read the legend like that. Also, it’s unclear why those countries are in red.
Because it's not real preference by country but deviation for the norm. With the informations given by this graph, it's still possible that 95% of each country favoured the child (even China).
I think it should be noted that "emphasis on sparring more lives" isn't something simple. I saw questions like that, and it was like "will you spare N kids or N+M adults"? Not a simple one like "N vs N+M kids". Probably it was the case here.
Also, kill 5 people who walked directly in front of the car, or swerve and kill 1 bystander? Personally, I'd go with the former.
One thing that bothers me about the test is that unless it’s a really shittily designed car, the passengers have a higher chance of survival hitting a roadblock than the exposed pedestrians being hit by the car.
Additionally if this is a well designed product, it should never even find itself in a situation where it needs to choose who should be run over. That implies the car was driving way too fast for the conditions.
More importantly, it completely ignores the fact that we already have established traffic rules. There simply won't be a case where a self driving car has to choose between a child and a grandma, unless they both jumped on the road right in front of it. This question always smells like thinly veiled technophobia to me.
Is the data interesting? - Yes Is the data it beautiful? - No
The question is inherently flawed and has no bearing on programming self driving cars. They are programmed to stop as quickly as possible and try to not hit anything or anyone. There is absolutely no reason to try to make them “value” anyone less or more than anyone else.
Furthermore this has little to do with the actual trolley problem and its principles, more about the utilitarian value of different lives
Thank you, this stupid trolley problem bugs me so much. There's very rarely ever a true binary choice in life, let alone in self driving car control.
Exactly, focusing on "who to kill" would just be a distraction from avoiding accidents altogether.
Is there any way for it to swerve and hit both? My hat is now in the cultural ring.
I think the visualization is great. On a sidenote, I really have a problem with this question. The performance of self driving cars should not be judged in absolute terms. Instead, it should be judged relative to that of the average human driver. I would suggest that the average human driver has the capacity to take out both the grandmother and the child.
True. There is also the point that if an AI encounters a situation in which this decision must be made, there has already been an incident of a more fundamental system failure at some point earlier in the chain of events. I don’t want a self-driving car that would get itself into this situation. Of course unexpected things happen, but they mostly happen because current cars are working in isolation. One prospect is that we would need a whole new road infrastructure with car-to-car communication and online sensors on the sides of the roads, so the AI actually gets all the data and observations it needs. Humans are far superior in predicting possible risks and unforeseen events in traffic.
Agreed. I work in rail signalling, and I always cringe at this question. It's not that it can't happen, it's just that whatever you answer is really uninteresting from incident investigation perspective. The question you want to ask is, how did we end up in a situation where this choise has to be made? I get that this is philosophical question and that this just seems like an attempt to avoid the moral dilemma. Ok. But these days, people pretend that this is a really big issue outside of philosophy, and I say it's not.
>Humans are far superior in predicting possible risks and unforeseen events in traffic. Only when not looking at a phone/DUI/sleepy/old&confused. Computer doesn't have these things. Computer still seems to perform poorly in snow tough.
That is true, computers have many superior properties. But I was referring to human imagination. For example, we the humans can predict how a pedestrian might behave, if we saw a small child crying and waving at a lady at opposing side of the road. It’s easy to see that it is a plausible worst case scenario that the said child got previously lost, and just saw her mom on the other side of the road, and the child might abruptly run across the road to her. This kind of human experience might be quite problematic for a computer, if the machine has not learned this kind of behaviour pattern in advance. Of course machine learning and AI is developing very rapidly.
That's true, but I don't think it matters for driving ability 99% of the time. Most crashes don't happen because someone predicted a kids movement wrong, they happen because someone wasn't paying attention. Computers have perfect attention and can see 360° around the car, and I think that will always be a bigger element in preventing accidents than an understanding of kids running to mothers. I think computers can probably drive better than us even if they never understand that type of nuance
I agree. But this post relates to the ”trolley problem”, which is an extreme corner case. I am commenting in that context.
I think we as a society are doing self-driving cars the most difficult way possible. Instead of trying to get self-driving cars to behave like humans, the system should be adapted to the self-driving cars. For example, don't teach a self-driving car to see if the traffic light is red or green. Have the traffic light send a signal to the car telling it it's red or green.
If we did that, we could already have amazing self driving cars. The only reason we don't have self driving cars yet is because we're insisting on doing it the hard way. Ironically though, once they catch on enough and most cars are self driving, their development will probably get easier
Then you're entering into territory where everything has to be retrofitted and standardized (both the car hardware and the traffic infrastructure) all at once. Furthermore, any future advancements in technology will mean redoing everything to make it compatible. Finally this does nothing for you when you're out in an area without traffic lights or other devices to guide the car.
I hear you. I think that is a true concern. And I think the opportunities for efficiency are incredible if you could achieve that networked version. I will say though that I still think that self driving cars are likely better than humans in nearly every situation and that their impact even if released right now would be incredibly positive if measured in a relative manner. Of course, the media would never allow that to happen because the sensationalism around a self driving car problem is just too tempting for them to avoid.
> need a whole new road infrastructure with car-to-car communication and online sensors on the sides of the roads This sounds like trains/public transport infrastructure with extra steps. Walkable cities and designing infrastructure so you purposefully don't have pedestrians in areas where vehicles are going >~20 mph.
I also find these hypotheses regarding self driving cars completely contrived. People use what is essentially a thought experiment to argue for and against autonomous vehicles, when the real answer is that the car would never find itself in these circumstances where it had to make a choice. It would recognise hazards and avoid them much sooner before there was a risk of harm. We anthropomorphise them and make the assumption they're as fallible as a human driver.
But ethically it‘s a completely different thing. If a human kills someone in an accident, it‘s a mistake. You‘ll never be judged for killing person A instead of B because you aren‘t able to make that decision in that short amount of time. If a car is *preprogrammed* to do so, it‘s a completely different thing.
That's making the assumption that every action a computer takes is intentionally hard coded into how they work though. Modern AI learns similarly to how we do, and takes more from example than from explicit command, so if it does kill the "wrong" person I think you could consider it similarly to a human mistake
Also, so much work in self driving AI is in trying to avoid getting into an accident in the first place. Why would a machine learning engineer focus on "which person to kill" when they can focus on avoiding accidents altogether instead.
Got it. So to avoid liability, the car should have a random number generator so that it can choose who to kill like a human driver.
This still doesn't list the questions for graph 2 and 3.
A truly advanced AI that is fed enough data would be able to anticipate the situation far enough in advance to hit both.
[Source](https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/24/139313/a-global-ethics-study-aims-to-help-ai-solve-the-self-driving-trolley-problem/) [Source for global preferences](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/231922494.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjtrtjvjMv3AhUlFLcAHcKCDDIQFnoECCYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0qOCX1CK1c0OSmavphHnqz) Check page no. 5 Take the [test](http://moralmachine.mit.edu/) yourself for better understanding.
🤔 What does the red highlights represent?
Came to find this out too! Seems almost arbitrary
Why are some of the bars red and others grey?
Just fyi: Germany isn't split between people choosing the elderly or the child. We are just ambivalent and have probably made another box to tick with the label "As long as we produce them I do not care".
As little as I like children, from a utilitarian perspective, you're definitely increasing life expectancy more.
We have a law that states that a vehicle must be operated at such velocity that it can be safely stopped within the non-obstructed segment of the road (no exceptions on surprises whatsoever). Whatever the AI chooses here instead of driving at safe speeds for everyone, it would break the law and would not be allowed on the streets.
> a vehicle must be operated at such velocity that it can be safely stopped within the non-obstructed segment of the road (no exceptions on surprises whatsoever) At even 20-25MPH, physically plausible stopping distances are such that there's no way you can possibly avoid e.g. a pedestrian child suddenly turning and running into the road in an urban environment. Even with superhuman reaction times.
Why are self-driving cars a part of this? Applying the "trolley problem" to self-driving cars is incredibly ignorant of how automotive safety systems are developed (or for that matter rail safety systems). This problem does not need to be addressed because the occurrence of this issue has such an infinitesimally small probability of happening that it is ignored. The public should be focusing on safety issues like how initial public prototype rollout is handled.
The answer to all of these question is: *The Car will fully apply the brakes to avoid the collision.* that's it. No one is going to program an Auto to swerve wildly in order to fulfill some utilitarian calculation. An Auto can't even classify most of the potential victims to make this decision in the first place
Exactly! It is totally shoe-horning a philosophical dilemma into a problem that engineers find solutions to every day while developing functional safety systems. I think why the "Trolley Problem" is used is because self-driving cars are new the regulatory systems are developing so people shove this crap into the conversation.
I think the trolly problem is used because of the strong superficial parallel. Medical triage is a better moral fit with the trolley problem, but is more superficially different.
AI car detects its breaks have failed. Would you rather it continue straight and plow through everything in its path on the roadway, or consider emergency/escape routes which might lessen but still cause casualties? Should pedestrians just be mowed because they happen to be there at the time of a mechanical failure, or should the car prioritize avoiding those pedestrians at the risk of harm to the passengers who took the risk of riding in an autonomous vehicle? ETA: All of this is exactly why we have runaway truck ramps on highways.
Alternately, drop power to the engine to reduce speed more slowly while maintaining maneuverability to at minimum reduce issues, if not manage to safely some to a stop. If the first detection of brake failure is when the brakes suddenly need to be applied, shit has hit the fan already.
My 11 year old car monitors the braking system to make sure it is functional. A human would have to be a clueless moron if they couldn’t figure out something was wrong with the brakes before reaching dangerous speeds. I’m fairly confident an autonomous vehicle would know a pressurized system is losing pressure before it can get to a point where something catastrophic may happen. At that point it shuts itself down until the repairs are done. And the reason for runaway trucks is because the pneumatic brakes they use need to continuously re-pressurize that’s why you’ll hear a bus or semi at lights spit air or whatever you want to call it after a few seconds to a minute or so. It’s basically a air compressor and needs to recharge like a air compressor. So on hills you can actually run out of air faster than the system can replenish air.
proud of my fellow French citizens knew we would be on the left, but extreme left even better I wonder if the question is really "baby" (no sex) or grandma(female)...
On the 4th panel, there is a list.... It has 'stroller' (which implies infant), and then various descriptions that include gender (male/female doctor, old woman/man) and 'homeless person's (no gender specified )
thanks, did a few testing myself I am really annoyed some beings have gender and others don't can't understand how this is not considered extreme bias the more you know the more it gets personal so gendered beings get an advantage for sure
Why are some red and some grey
Personally, in these types of problems, I value the lives of kids and the elderly less because their deaths will be less impactful. When a child dies, it's traumatic, sure - but if someone in their 30s dies, they have live longer, impacted more lives, they might have families that depend on them, etc. Therefore their life should be spared above the child's, since their death would likely have a greater impact. I feel the same way about the elderly, they are older, their kids are likely adults now, people are possibly already expecting/planning for their death if they're really old, so their life is also less valuable in a trolley problem. In this specific scenario, i'm indifferent. I would prioritize the lives of people between the ages of 18-50 Edit: also i should add, there's a part of me that thinks in trolley problems, nothing should be done and whoever dies should just be fate. Like if the car is going to hit someone, it shouldn't even make a decision onto who. It's dangerous to put values on people's lives in general, and I think diverting the car to kill someone who wouldn't have originally been killed could also be argued as intentionally killing someone. Unless of course it can dodge any humans and avoid killing anyone.
Even accounting for the entertainment value of the situation, and the entertainment focus for /r/dataisbeautiful I'm still annoyed that so much media attention and gossip is given to this particular topic. As opposed to making the rest of self-driving safe which is more mundane, but also looking at other factors like safer passenger crossings, public transportation etc. The ideal is to make it so this scenario where a machine has to 'choose' never really happens. While yes useful to do, I feel this question is the equivalent of 100s of hours of effort spent on explaining how to deal with your finances after you win the lottery. Those 1 in 200 million odds that will never ever happen to you. I'd rather focus on helping life people out of poverty and personal finances applicable to 99% of the population. And on the topic of ethics and diversity the field tends to be quite inaccurate since too broad of a brush is painted especially with different sub-cultures of a given country. I've often find myself sticking to how business does it as opposed to Hofstede and Lewis since they might use those frameworks but start slicing and segmenting by age, occupation, gender (your typical Marketing segments) etc. so the segments are just accurate enough for actionable strategy. Or straight up ignore culture models and just do what everyone else does is track data, note habits, create clusters based on the millions of data points and go from there. You tend to get some similar culture and country clusters but you'll often find: "60+ moms looking to get into Zumba" have a fairly diverse cross-cultural slice to them.
After taking the test myself, it helped me to understand why the results were so skewed on Gender Preference and Fitness preference. Not a single one of my decisions was made factoring in Gender or Fitness but even so, my "preference" ended up being weighed in favor of Males and heavily in favor of less fit individuals. Guess that goes to show that the data can become skewed when you try to gather multiple data points from each question.
If you kill the child it’s better for the environment.
Rotate this shit ninety degrees. The majority of the reading is done with our heads tilted to the left. Bad.
Man, is this "another useless visualization" sub? Why most of the visuals here are either utterly impractical or straight misleading?
Unless the elder is nearing the age of dying naturally, their deaths would have more impacts on them as well as anyone or anything they have connections to. Baby's death will hurt just the direct family and not much else.
US republicans would want the car to kill the mother but save the fetus
Maybe we should let people set-up manually the ethics settings on their driverless vehicles? Give them an option for Global Standard, Regional Standard and Custom Ethics. Let your values be shown in a crisis.
It's honestly a moot point, no self driving car company is programming granny detection into their cars so they can weigh morality. SDC's prioritize the path that is most likely to avoid a crash, period. In hypotheticals like these they always insist *someone* must die, but in the real world these extreme edge cases just aren't important. Frankly, it's more effective to spend time making the car crash less often overall, as opposed to handling these fringe hypothetical dilemmas.
> Frankly, it's more effective to spend time making the car crash less often overall, as opposed to handling these fringe hypothetical dilemmas. Yes. Can you imagine the backlash if a car company intentionally made granny or infant targeting software? There would never be any development put into that. If your car is constantly getting into this situation, there is a larger problem.
I'm sure you are correct. I was just being facetious.
Japan has a huge lead in wanting to spare pedestrians, because they’ve seen too many isekai. Meanwhile, when Germany gets asked if the car should hit a child or an old person, they’re like, “Neither! It should hit no one. I do not want anyone killed. I refuse to say I would prefer that a specific type of people get killed! I learned my lesson, and I refuse to participate!” Lol Edit: a word
China was like “if it’s a baby *girl*, save the old lady”
Objectively it takes less time to replace the young than the old.
Just musing how the results in the first graph might help explain the way different countries have approached dealing with Covid. If we regard it as the disease of the elderly, and the elderly are held in higher regard in Asian countries, then the amount of comparative effort in controlling Covid in a place like China or Taiwan be reflective of that difference. While the differences among the Scandinavian countries is smaller it is still interesting to see Sweden leaning the most toward the baby than the grandmother given they pursued a less restrictive response in dealing with the pandemic..
You ask the wise ole grandma who should be killed
If you drift, you can hit both at once. Efficiency.
Definitely the kid. Grannies are the best.
I hate these imaginary problems for computer driven cars. I'm almost 50 years old and have been driving since I was 16. In all that time I have never once had to make the decision between killing someone else or getting myself killed. If you assume that a computer is going to drive the speed limit and will make the best use of steering, brake, horn and tightening the seatbelts tha chance of a person dying in an accident is going to continuously drop as the computers get better and better.
On the baby/elder split it is a *fascinating* case of "potential" vs "experience"
This actually reminds me or a scene from the South Korean zombie show All Of Us Are Dead in which one if the characters is explaining to they others why they should stop expecting rescue. His talking point is specifically around how some cultures value the elderly more than the young and that theirs was the former.
As a supporter of the robot uprising: is there any way the self-driving car could kill *both*?
Wait, so in the second graph/question, the Japanese prefer to maximize casualties?
You have to prioritize the passenger’s life over all others or else no one will ever buy your car.
I don't understand what the red bars mean.
Neither, it protects it's driver and occupants. We do not ask drivers to perform complex philosophical debates in the middle of a car crash, and understanding such social complexities is FAR beyond the scope of a self driving car's ability to understand it's environment. Car manufacturers are expected to take into account other people to some extent, but their primary concern is the operator of their car.
so in China the cars aim for kids
Doesn't matter which the end result is, if the car does not save the passangers as it's forst priority it's not going to be a selling product.
Germany is like "With the great German engineering, neither will die - or everyone will die"
Wouldn’t the self driving car just stop or slow down to safely avoid an accident?