I remember reading an interesting article about the "split second" decisions that autonomous cars need to make on our behalf. Some of the more interesting questions were...
You are driving along a one-way road. There is a sheer drop to your right and a solid wall to your left. As you round a bend, there are four children in front of you. There is no possibility of stopping. Do you:
- Brake hard, but allow the car to hit the children?
- Drive the car off the cliff to the right?
The follow-up question was ... What if, instead of children, it was an armed man who appears to want to car-jack you?
If you were the programmer, what would you tell the code to do?
The answer to this question comes from denying the assumptions.
If you are driving on a one-way road next to a cliff. Then visibility is X feet.
If you cannot stop in X feet, you are going to fast, slow down.
This continues until you are safe, or you have stopped.
And the answer, if you include "all of a sudden" into the scenario is to brake as hard as you can. It is the least damaging thing you can do. The other option is to turn the car into a known deathtrap. In case of emergency, the passengers will be terminated.
Turning the car into a known deathtrap for it's owners on emergency seems like a good way to turn people away who would want to buy these cars. I think the car should kill the other people, and not it's master :) How else will the loan ever be paid off then for the car? lol. Breaking as fast as it can sounds like the best option, but I think this would be a rare edge case to program for.
This is the best answer!!! Do autonomous cars travel at the posted speed limit or do they take into account for visibility?
These are some deep and very interesting questions!
It's incredibly hard to answer those.
This is something you don't think about, but of course the programmers have to deal with those kind of questions too.
how many times have you had to decide in a situation like that?
I live in Northern Ontario in Canada.
For us, it's usually a situation closer to ...
Autonomous vehicles would have radar at minimum.
Probably infra-red, sonar, and who knows what else.
They'll be able to see through the snow.
If the snow is so heavy that they CAN'T...why are you on the road in the first place?
The likely hood hitting anything in front of it would be much less than with human drivers.
if the wee beastie were to jump out in front (like I had a deer do to me) then the autonomous vehicle would STILL be more likely to avoid it than you or me. 360 sensors don't you know...and reactions at the speed of light, not slow biological reflexes.
Any way you look at it, in any given situation, autonomous vehicles will be safer than people