The Greater Good
Paul Huynh
CS305
November 27th, 2015
The Greater Good?
When it comes to questions regarding morality, the line between what is right and what is wrong becomes very blurred. Determining what is right and what is wrong is already is answered differently from person to person. If people can not agree on what is the right thing to do, should we hand over such moral-conflicted matters to a machine? This may sound like like a quote from Blade runner or some other work of science fiction, but this question may have to be answered soon. Selfdriving car will in all likelihood be on the street along side with human driven cars and other selfdriving cars. That means that a computer will have to start making decisions that a human would usually make.
There …show more content…
As acknowledges earlier; accidents are unavoidable and are bound to happen. Participate were presented with various scenario and were asked questions as to what the right thing to do in the scenario was.
All of the scenarios were very similar, it usually involved a car speeding towards somebody or somebodies. The subject was changed in every scenario; like number of people that are in the way, the age of the people that are in the way or anything along those lines. The participants are then asked if they would swerve to the side or not, in which case would either hurt or kill the driver. The subject of what the hypothetical car swerve into also changed from case to case.
There seem to be a bias in this study though. It was noted that 75 percent of the participants were willing the sacrifice the driver in order to save the other peoples' lives. The key-phrase is “the driver,” the participants did not see themselves as actually being the driver. This dissociation …show more content…
Even with self-driven cars, human error is not entirely eliminated. Humans are still building the car, maintaining the car, and most importantly; coding the program that is going to pick and choose who is going to die in these greater good scenarios. So when a car accident does occur, who is to blame for it? Usually the fault lands in the lap of the coders. According to the ACM/IEEE 1.01, the coder should accept responsibility of the program that he had made (ACM).
No matter what the circumstances are, it could always be argued that the programmer should have had the foresight to prevent such a catastrophe. In a perfect world, that argument hold, but coders are humans, and humans are not perfect beings. There is no possible way for the coder to be able to predict every possible situation.
A newly written raw programs will more than likely have bugs. Every program that is released to the public, from small browser add-ons to 30 gigabyte video games, they are not without bugs and glitches despite hundreds of hours of testing. Over the years company have become more lax on
CS305
November 27th, 2015
The Greater Good?
When it comes to questions regarding morality, the line between what is right and what is wrong becomes very blurred. Determining what is right and what is wrong is already is answered differently from person to person. If people can not agree on what is the right thing to do, should we hand over such moral-conflicted matters to a machine? This may sound like like a quote from Blade runner or some other work of science fiction, but this question may have to be answered soon. Selfdriving car will in all likelihood be on the street along side with human driven cars and other selfdriving cars. That means that a computer will have to start making decisions that a human would usually make.
There …show more content…
As acknowledges earlier; accidents are unavoidable and are bound to happen. Participate were presented with various scenario and were asked questions as to what the right thing to do in the scenario was.
All of the scenarios were very similar, it usually involved a car speeding towards somebody or somebodies. The subject was changed in every scenario; like number of people that are in the way, the age of the people that are in the way or anything along those lines. The participants are then asked if they would swerve to the side or not, in which case would either hurt or kill the driver. The subject of what the hypothetical car swerve into also changed from case to case.
There seem to be a bias in this study though. It was noted that 75 percent of the participants were willing the sacrifice the driver in order to save the other peoples' lives. The key-phrase is “the driver,” the participants did not see themselves as actually being the driver. This dissociation …show more content…
Even with self-driven cars, human error is not entirely eliminated. Humans are still building the car, maintaining the car, and most importantly; coding the program that is going to pick and choose who is going to die in these greater good scenarios. So when a car accident does occur, who is to blame for it? Usually the fault lands in the lap of the coders. According to the ACM/IEEE 1.01, the coder should accept responsibility of the program that he had made (ACM).
No matter what the circumstances are, it could always be argued that the programmer should have had the foresight to prevent such a catastrophe. In a perfect world, that argument hold, but coders are humans, and humans are not perfect beings. There is no possible way for the coder to be able to predict every possible situation.
A newly written raw programs will more than likely have bugs. Every program that is released to the public, from small browser add-ons to 30 gigabyte video games, they are not without bugs and glitches despite hundreds of hours of testing. Over the years company have become more lax on