Just spotted this latest stuff - in truth, the original article with the Mercedes guy's full quotes are more interesting than the histrionic clickbait stuff which is full of spinning cars etc (let's face it, the AI isn't going to be omniscient, once you are far enough outside 'normal' parameters I imagine the electronics response to a dynamically unstable spinning situation would be similar to Airbus' abnormal attitude law, effectively slam on the brakes and allow driver input - if controls are still fitted?)
http://blog.caranddriver.com/self-driving-mercedes-will-prioritize-occupant-safety-over-pedestrians/
Snippets below, but I recommend reading the whole thing:
"The technology is new, but the moral conundrum isn’t: A self-driving car identifies a group of children running into the road. There is no time to stop. To swerve around them would drive the car into a speeding truck on one side or over a cliff on the other, bringing certain death to anybody inside."
"Pedestrian or other external victims’ lawyers will be expected to argue that their loved ones had been murdered by robots, while dead occupants’ lawyers might argue they’d been murdered, while doing nothing wrong, by the very machine they’d bought to protect them. The automaker is going to get sued one way or the other, much as human drivers get sued regularly today for the decisions they make. To get around some of this issue, Mercedes-Benz’s German rival Audi says it will assume full legal responsibility for any crashes or fatalities from its first Level 3 self-driving car, next year’s A8 sedan. Swedish carmaker Volvo has already said it will take up the same legal position when it begins selling self-driving cars in 2020."
"A study released at midyear by Science magazine didn’t clear the air, either. The majority of the 1928 people surveyed thought it would be ethically better for autonomous cars to sacrifice their occupants rather than crash into pedestrians. Yet the majority also said they wouldn’t buy autonomous cars if the car prioritized pedestrian safety over their own. Which would seem to cut through the issue for anyone whose goal is to sell cars."
“This moral question of whom to save: 99 percent of our engineering work is to prevent these situations from happening at all. We are working so our cars don’t drive into situations where that could happen and [will] drive away from potential situations where those decisions have to be made.”
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