IS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE A SERIOUS QUESTION?:

Hands-Off Training: Google's Self-Driving Car Holds Tantalizing Promise, but Major Roadblocks Remain: Driverless automobiles lack common sense but are getting better at using mapping, GPS and sensing technologies to hold the road (Nick Chambers, May 23, 2011, Scientific American)

The way M.I.T.'s Leonard sees it, these elements of unreliability are what hinder a place for self-driving cars in our future. "Imagine a situation where a box falls on the road in front of you because it wasn't strapped down properly," he says. "The system needs to make a split-second decision to either go straight through it or to swerve left or right—which might have worse consequences than just going forward. The crux of the problem lies in those extreme situations at the tails of the curve that get harder and harder to deal with."

"Despite all the best efforts of the robot designers, humans still do stupid things," Leonard says. "Suppose 10 human-generated fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society wants to make?"

The real question is how we can justify all the deaths caused by allowing the young, the old and the drunk to drive at all.

Posted by oj at May 25, 2011 6:12 AM
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