Merge pull request #22 from jrtechs/selfDrivingCarDebate

Self driving car debate

blogContent/posts/other/morality-of-self-driving-cars.md

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+Although the movie *I Robot* has not aged well, it still brings up some interesting ethical questions
+that we are still discussing concerning self driving cars. The protagonist Detective Spooner 
+has an almost unhealthy amount of distrust towards
+robots. In the movie, a robot decided to save Spooner's life over a 12 year old girl in a car accident. 
+This ignites the famous ethical debate of the trolley problem, but, now with artificial intelligence.
+The debate boils down to this: are machines capable of making moral decisions. The 
+ surface level answer from the movie is presented as **no** when Spooner's presents car crash antidote.
+This question parallels the discussion that we are currently having with self driving cars.
+When a self driving car is presented with two options which result in the loss of life,
+what should it choose?
+
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+When surveyed, most people say that they would prefer to have self driving cars take the utilitarian 
+approach towards the trolley problem. A utilitarian approach would try to minimize the
+ total amount of harm. MIT made a neat [website](http://moralmachine.mit.edu/) where it presents you with a 
+bunch of "trolley problems" where you have to decide who dies. At the end of the survey the
+website presents you with a list of observed preferences you made when deciding who's life was more important to save.
+The purpose of the trolley problem is merely to ponder what decision a self driving car
+should make when **all** of its alternatives are depleted. 
+
+![Moral Machine](media/selfDrivingCars/moralmachine3.png)
+
+
+We still need to question whether
+utilitarianism is the right moral engine for self driving cars. Would it be ethical 
+for a car to take into account 
+you age, race, gender, and social status when deciding if you get to live? 
+If self driving cars could access personal information such as criminal history or known friends, would it
+ be ethical to use that information? Would it be moral for
+someone to make a car which favored the safety of the passengers of the car above 
+others?
+
+![Moral Machine](media/selfDrivingCars/moralMachine.png)
+
+
+Even though most people want self driving cars to use utilitarianism, most people surveyed also responded
+that they would not buy a car which did not have their safety as its top priority.
+This brings up a serious social dilemma. If people want everyone else's cars to be utilitarians,
+yet, have their own cars be greedy and favor their safety, we would see none of the utilitarian improvements. This 
+presented us with the tragedy of the commons problem since everyone would favor their own 
+safety and nobody would sacrifice their safety for the public good. This brings up yet another question:
+would it be fair to ask someone to sacrifice their safety in this way?
+
+In most cases, when a tragedy of the commons situation is presented, government intervention is
+ the most piratical solution. It might be the best to have the government
+mandate that all cars try to maximize the amount of life saved when a car is presented with the
+trolley problem. Despite appearing to be a good solution, the flaw in this does not become apparent before you us 
+consequentialism to examine this problem.
+
+![Moral Machine](media/selfDrivingCars/moralMachine6.png)
+
+Self driving cars are expected to reduce car accidents by 90% by eliminating human error. If people
+decide to not use self driving cars due to the utilitarian moral engine, we run the 
+risk of actually loosing more lives. Some people have actually argued that since
+artificial intelligence is incapable of making moral decisions, they should take
+no action at all when there is a situation which will always results in the loss of life. 
+In the frame of the trolley problem, 
+it is best for the artificial intelligence to not pull the lever. I will argue that 
+it is best for self driving cars to not make ethical
+decisions because, it would result in the highest adoption rate of self driving cars. This would end up
+saving the most lives in the long run. Plus, the likelihood that a car is actually presented with
+ a trolley problem is pretty slim.
+
+The discussion over the moral decisions a car has to make is almost fruitless. It turns out 
+that humans are not even good at making moral decisions in emergency situations. When we make rash decisions
+influenced by anxiety, we are heavily influenced by prejudices and self motives. Despite our own shortcomings when it
+comes to decision making, that does not mean that we can not do better with self driving cars. However,
+we need to realize that it is the mass adoption of self driving cars which will save the most lives, not
+the moral engine which we program the cars with. We can not let the moral engine of the self driving 
+cars get in the way of adoption. 
+
+The conclusion that I made parallels Spooner's problem with robots in the movie *I Robot*. Spooner was so mad at the robots for
+saving his own life rather than the girl's, he never realized that if it was not for the robots, neither of them would
+have survived that car crash. Does that mean we can't do better than not pulling the lever? Well... not exactly. 
+Near the end of the movie a robot was presented with another trolley problem, but, this time he managed to
+find a way which saved both parties. Without reading into this movie too deep, this illustrates how the early
+adoption of artificial intelligence ended up saving tons of lives like Spooners. It is only when the technology fully develops 
+is when we can start to avoid the trolley problem completely.
+
+
+