@JoaoBernardino dá uma vista de olhos nestas abordagens mais recentes e que vêm do país que criou a Vision Zero.
"*The trolley problem – a dilemma of moral philosophy
Imagine that two children jump out into the path of your self-driving car from behind another parked car. They are chasing a ball and appear so suddenly that it is too late to be able to brake. However, the car can choose to steer to the side, but it would then run over an elderly person on a mobility scooter instead. It is therefore too late to save everybody, but there is time to choose whether we should save two children at the expense of one old person. Everything happens very quickly, but the cars’ electronics respond at lightning speed. We should have made a choice when we programmed them from the start. Is it reasonable that we allow a few individual engineers to make decisions on life and death on their own initiative when programming self-driving cars?
This is roughly how a variant of what is termed “the trolley problem” can be formulated. It crops up here and there on the Internet where some impossible situation for self-driving cars is addressed, often with an ensuing discussion full of moral indignation.
It is worth remembering that this is a hypothetical problem designed to facilitate discussion as to how different moral principles can come into conflict with each other. One principle is that one should always act for the greater good of the greatest number of people. According to this principle, it would better for just one person to die than for several. The second principle is that one should never intentionally commit an act that may cause the death of another.
There is no obvious right or wrong to this type of problem. Its purpose is to allow us to discuss what we see as our moral priorities. The task of the moral philosopher is to formulate the problems and make us aware that they exist.
Back to the self-driving cars
If we return to our self-driving cars, the problem arises in many different guises. Sometimes it is rendered rather more incisive: the car can save everyone outside, but at the expense of the person in it. We could imagine we might save the children at play if we swerved off the road completely – only to drive over a precipice and die.
There are moral philosophers who go so far as to ask whether we are ready for utilitarian cars (i.e. the principle that one should always act for the greater good of the greatest number of people) and therefore also ready to accept that one may be killed on purpose by one’s own self-driving car. This is indeed a thought-provoking question as far as it goes. The problem is that it is entirely superfluous.
The reasoning as to why this should be so is not actually that difficult. The only thing we need to program our car to do, is to think in the same way as all of us are taught when we are prepared for our driving test. You should always bear in mind what might be concealed by something that is blocking your view. There may be a car coming towards you just over the crest of the hill. A car may turn out from behind the next corner. A child may jump out from behind a parked car. You need to adapt your driving behaviour to be able to deal with such surprises. We tell teenagers this when they are learning to drive, and it sounds quite reasonable in that situation. So why not tell our cars the same thing?
The solution is for the cars to embody safe driving behaviour
We need the cars to be able judge how far they are completely certain that everything is safe. Then we need them to adapt their driving behaviour to be able to deal with a situation where something might suddenly appear in the next millisecond at the limits of their own certainty. In this way, we can get the cars to guarantee they will never be surprised in a manner that precludes safe alternatives.
Instead of programming the cars to handle difficult moral situations, we program them to drive in a manner that guarantees they never end up in a moral dilemma. This does not have to mean they drive a lot slower than human beings would. It is entirely dependent on how good their sensors are at seeing, how quick they are at reacting and how quick they are at braking/steering. By adapting the self-driving car’s own decisions about its driving behaviour to its own capability, we can avoid morally problematic situations."