Every life is special. Every life is sacred. Every life has rights and hopes and dreams and its own special contribution to humanity.
Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances?
"Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how else should we reason about seat belts? Or anything similar that is going to help save lives in the vast majority of cases, but may fail in some?
We don't always have the option of perfection. And is it really ethical to stand by as special, sacred lives end because we can't save every life, every time?
And let's recall that this isn't a choice between "human drivers, no lives lost" vs. "AI drivers, some lives lost".
It's a choice between "human drivers, MANY MANY lives lost" and "AI drivers, fewer lives lost".
What would archagon have us do? Not have AI drivers until a perfect solution is possible? The "crash-unavoidable" scenario is an unavoidable reality as long as stopping distances/acceleration/reaction times are non-zero.
It sounds as if archagon would have us spend all our time looking at trees -- and none of it looking at the forest -- all while thousands of people die every year under the status quo.
I think perhaps the reason archagon is so aghast though is a combination of two things:
1) The illusion of [human] control and judgement. Implicit in archagon's reasoning is the idea that the outcome MIGHT have been different had a human been making a decision. Yet a human WAS in control here, and DIDN'T make a different decision. That happens. A lot. Archagon seems to be so distracted by the novelty of this situation that he/she has not noticed that.
2) The normalization of automotive deaths and safety engineering in the current industry. 90 people die per day in the U.S. due to errors made by human drivers. Every day human drivers are on the road, 90 more lives are snuffed out. If we follow archagon's hand-wringing, then how could we justify having cars AT ALL? Of course, the reality that many people would die because of the lack of cars makes even the abolition of cars a less than perfect solution with (according to archagon's apparent line of reasoning) a body count attached and all the moral implications thereof.
Putting aside the fact that many ordinary people would find your perspective lacking humanity and hilariously on the opposite side of their own moral compass:
I really didn't offer much other than an opposing perspective and a call to be more moderate. This will come up again and again, and it would pay to have a bit of empathy here.
I have empathy. I have empathy for the friends and family of those we cannot save. I also have empathy for the reduced number of people that will suffer losses of friends and loved ones as we reduce harm to the human herd.
What should I do? If you think jfrisby and myself lack empathy, what do you think empathy looks like and how do you think it would change our moral stances?
Is this an academic question to you? Or do you actually have these questions weighing on your conscience as a result of things you've done in the course of your work?
I have empathy for the ~33,000 people that die every year because humans are terrible drivers.
You do not. You want to take a moral posture that condemns thousands of people to needless deaths because you're so caught up in emotion you can't see the harm your position would cause.
Wallowing in your own emotions is selfish and immoral when it costs actual lives.
Your entire premise is based on the false assumption that this system was making all the decisions. Tesla's "autopilot" does not override the driver. It does not replace the driver (yet). That's explicitly because everyone involved knows it's not ready for that responsibility yet, no matter how much they've tested it. Tesla knows they cannot possibly anticipate everything -- the whole point of this "public beta" is to gather more information and help them make a better, safer system that eventually is trustworthy enough to consistently make decisions better than people.
You posit that human decision-makers behind the wheel are an important thing we should be wary of giving up but you have ignored one simple fact: There WAS a human behind the wheel, expressly charged -- both by law and by Tesla -- with maintaining control of the vehicle.
The driver had the responsibility of hitting the brakes, and did not do so. That's an error that plays out dozens of times per day without AI drivers being involved.
But instead of recognizing that this is a case of not just a piece of software failing, but also of a human failing -- and instead of recognizing the cost of lost and shattered lives borne by society every day -- you resort to ill-conceived hand-wringing in an attempt to convince others to follow you down a path that would continue condemning untold numbers of people to needless deaths.
Would we let a doctor murder a random healthy person to harvest organs to save ten lives? When we talk about weighing alternatives, it's like you say: It won't save lives in all cases, but it will decrease the loss of innocent lives overall.
That introduces an imminent death that wasn't there before. Doing so with a deliberate decision changes the whole thing.
This is more like vaccines. They protect a great many lives from events not deliberately introduced at the cost of a small number of bad reactions. Is that number more than zero? Yes. Does it feel small if it's someone you love? No. Is humanity as a whole better off for polio vaccines? Yes, absolutely.
When we talk about weighing alternatives, we're talking about considering the status quo as an option that might be actively chosen rather than a privileged position.
It's kind of like a reverse firing squad: we won't choose to kill 1 person with 100% certainty, but we will choose to kill 1,000,000 people with a probability of 0.000001 each.
When your choice is 1,000,000 people with 0.0001 each or those same 1,000,000 people with 0.00000001 each, it starts to seem like a really silly question.
Every human life is unique, special, and sacred. Yet, we cannot ethically permit ourselves to be paralyzed by this to the point where we refuse to reduce the amount of avoidable death because our options are not perfect.
Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances?
"Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how else should we reason about seat belts? Or anything similar that is going to help save lives in the vast majority of cases, but may fail in some?
We don't always have the option of perfection. And is it really ethical to stand by as special, sacred lives end because we can't save every life, every time?