GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Should driverless cars be utilitarian or egalitarian?

domingo, 6 de mayo de 2018

Should driverless cars be utilitarian or egalitarian?

Should driverless cars be utilitarian or egalitarian?

Bioedge

Should driverless cars be utilitarian or egalitarian?

by Xavier Symons | 5 May 2018 |

Debate over self-driving cars has intensified in the US following the two driverless vehicle fatalities in March. Some commentators argue that all driverless car tests should be halted until safety concerns are addressed.

Yet there is another question that requires urgent consideration, namely, “what kind of ethics should we program into driverless cars?”. Self-driving cars may face decisions involving a choice between which lives to prioritise in the event of an impending crash. And these decisions require ethical answers.

A new paper in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience analyses the views of human beings on how driverless cars should manage these situations. Researchers from Osnabruck University in Germany analysed the responses of 189 participants to a series of difficult ethical scenarios, including a scenario in which participants must choose between careering into a crowd and running over a single pedestrian, and another scenario in which participants must choose between sacrificing their own lives or taking the lives of a group of pedestrians.

The researchers found that respondents overwhelmingly sought to minimise loss of life, and where generally willing to sacrifice their own lives. Respondents also tended to favour younger persons over older persons.

The researchers described the respondent’s intuitions as “utilitarian”, and noted a conflict between this and the egalitarian philosophy underpinning current government regulations on driverless technology.

Throughout the experiment the subjects' decision making is more in line with utilitarianism, i.e., utilitarianism is more sensitive to the factors which subjects seem to recognize as morally relevant...The factors identified here, however, clash not only with moral theories, but also with political norms as laid out by the German ethics commission for autonomous driving.

The authors recommend that policy makers establish an open dialogue with broader society about the moral norms for self-driving cars. Policy makers should attempt to explain their egalitarian policies, cognisant that if the public rejects them they may need to be revised

Bioedge

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Personally, I'm not a big fan of super-hero films. I get a bit tired of the wisecracks and the fake explosions and crumbling buildings. But that's me, I'm afraid. Age. Generational change. Fuddy-duddy etc.

However, they are interesting thermometers of the culture. Black Panther certainly taps into a revolt against racism. Guardians of the Galaxy revolves around lost fatherhood. And the really, really bad guy in the latest epic, Avengers: Infinity War, is obsessed with population control. He has a plan for eliminating half the population of the earth. It's a reprise of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 damp squib, The Population Bomb, which predicted social collapse and environmental disaster unless the brakes were put on world population. It was a very scary script and it never happened, like most disaster movies.

What I wonder is this: does this mean that over-population still scares people or that it no longer does? Thanos, after all, is a villain, and the Avengers are out to defend the world, not support his extreme environmentalist creed. My feeling is that very few people are fretting about over-population as such, although the real problem, a shrinking and greying population, isn't attracting much interest either. Any thoughts?