Reply to post: Re: Descisions

Why do driverless car makers have this insatiable need for speed?

Wilco

Re: Descisions

This specific situation is easy to deal with:

You should never program a car to swerve into oncoming traffic, because the forces involved between two cars in a head on collision will be much, much higher due to the rapid deceleration. Also you are increasing the average number of people involved, since the average occupancy of vehicles is > 1.

Even if it's inevitable that the pedestrian is going to be hit, the car will have some time to reduce the impact speed, and possibly deploy pedestrian safety measures such as pop up bonnets, which will reduce the severity of passenger injuries.

In practice programming a car to minimize harm to the occupants of the car and other road users (probably in that order - who's going to get in a car that will drive them off a cliff to avoid a pedestrian?) should give acceptable results.

You can probably devise some contrived situation where an impossible choice has to be made (see "The Trolley Problem") but the chances of any such situation actually arising are very small

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