system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Self-driving cars don't need to solve the trolley problem

A recurring theme I see is that self-driving cars will need to solve the trolley problem or some other forms of ethical dilemmas. I find this absurd.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining about ethics or philosophy. Those are worthwhile endeavors and even when they are just playing word games, it's no worst than some mathematicians having fun with weird structures.

My complaint is with the view that self-driving cars will in the near to medium term need to solve ethical dilemmas. (I make no claims about what will happen, say, 200 years from now)

The design and implementation of self-driving cars is limited by scarce resources. You need engineers, statisticians, mathematicians etc to do the design. You need a lot of computing power to create good models, run simulations, etc... Then the car has limited computing resources it must use in order to execute its program in real time.

My contention is that with very high probability, if you have the choice between allocating any of those resources for further reducing the risk of a collision vs designing and implementing some ethical theory, the ethical theory in question will mandate that you spend those resources on reducing the risk of a collision. (For reasonably-common ethical theories.)

To put it another way, instead of having your self-driving car try to identify who is a child and who is a heart surgeon and who is an elderly person on the edge of death so it can decide who lives and who dies, it could be spending those cycles looking for a way to avoid a collision or reduce the impact. And the programmers who worked on that problem could have spent their time working on preventing that situation from occuring in the first place. And you could have hired better mechanical engineers to put better breaks on your car and a better airbag for the passengers.

In other words, the most ethical thing to do is not to make your car ethical when it has to get into a collision. It's to make your car gets into fewer collisions and reduce collision speeds.

Change my view.

PS: I work for a company that builds self-driving cars. I have not insider knowledge on this aspect of the company. It is not something I work on. I also don't speak for my employer at all.

Edit: Thank you all. I will likely stop responding now on account of having to work so I can afford my internet connection to go on reddit. This has been informative, frustrating and overall valuable. My view moved a little bit, but not much. I think I did a poor job of explaining my focus on resource allocation which led to a lot of misunderstandings. Lesson for me in the future.
gpt
You just gave a particular answer to the trolley problem that you're saying self-driving cars should use in your claim that the car doesn't need to solve the trolley problem.

> the most ethical thing to do is not to make your car ethical when it has to kill people. It's to make your car kill fewer people.

That is one of the classic answers to the trolley problem.

If you think your own prompt is correct, then your view that solving the trolley problem is unnecessary is wrong.