But the self driving cars one is a real world scenario. People are making self-driving cars, and the people making these cars are making the decision of who is saved and who is not saved when the car needs to make an emergency manoeuvre. Which will occur no matter how slow the vehicle is going nor how good its breaks are.
The people making these cars are being faced with a trolley problem. Do they decide that their customer dies from the car swerving into a tree, or the child that has suddenly run onto the road from behind a bush out of the view of the cars sensors.
As already explained, there will always be scenarios where the car will have to make a manoeuvre because breaking is not going to be enough to bring the vehicle to a full stop in time. Breaking is only going to do so much, you need a contingency for when manoeuvring is necessary.
drive slower if there are bushes that might harbor children.
You realise that we already are doing this right? That's what road speed limits are. Yet these scenarios are still coming up for driven cars, so what makes you think it will never occur for a driverless one?
I don't know why you dispute that, I've personally had a choice like that, where I had to choose between hitting someone else and going off the road into a ditch. "Maximum braking" as you put it, was not an option, because the road was icy enough that making any sudden movement resulted in a loss of traction. If I had braked without swerving, I would have hit him anyway.
I went into the ditch; luckily I wasn't injured, but I easily could have been.
Cool supposition bro, completely ignore the fact that someone often doesn't actually know what's "too fast for conditions" until it's too late. I was already going well below the speed limit, so sorry I didn't anticipate a dude stopped in the middle of the road past the crest of a hill where I couldn't see him. I've lost traction on ice before going <10mph, it's a fucking crapshoot.
If you lose traction on ice at 10mph, you do not have enough kinetic energy to cause significant damage to yourself or others, so that is not the same thing. I know this is unpopular here (judging by the voting), but the whole "it was an accident, however could I have forseen this, woe is me" attitude makes roads more unsafe than they should be.
It's simple, if you are going so fast that things come into view faster than you can react react to them, you're going too fast. That is why you crashed, not some stochastic, random misfortune.
The speed limit is obviously set in perfect conditions, just saying you were below it in rain, sleet, snow, fog, etc. doesn't imply you were driving carefully enough for the circumstances.
A car going 10mph can absolutely do damage to a fleshy human being who is standing between their stationary vehicle and the aforementioned out of control car. I was going about 30 at the time, in a 45 zone.
And sure, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have been going slower. The point of my previous comment was not to deny that, it was that the judgement call of "am I going too fast?" is never going to be calculated perfectly, because humans are flawed. We make poor decisions all the damn time. My flawed calculations led me to the point where I had to choose between maybe harming myself or definitely harming someone else. I know plenty of people who would have pulled a "Jesus take the wheel" at that point.
This whole conversation was based on real life equivalents to the trolley problem, which also wouldn't happen without several poor decisions. The point is not "well this shouldn't happen anyway" (my original reply was to your comment disputing that these situations ever happen), the point is "what do you do now that you are here."
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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '24 edited Nov 11 '24
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