The scary part
Via "Nature":

The demons who design autonomous cars are pretending to seek "moral" values for the "moral" conundrums that a driver supposedly must resolve.

They ran a survey and found that people in different countries want their cars to make different decisions, depending on who the pedestrian is and what he's doing.

The details of these decisions are trivial.

The scary part, as usual, is the FLAT IMPLICIT ASSUMPTION that doesn't need explaining.

Rahwan gathered an international team of psychologists, anthropologists and economists to create the Moral Machine. Within 18 months, the online quiz had recorded 40 million decisions made by people from 233 countries and territories. ... Nations could be divided into three groups. One contains North America and several European nations where Christianity has historically been the dominant religion; another includes countries such as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, with strong Confucian or Islamic traditions. A third group consists of Central and South America, as well as France and former French colonies.

Unsurprising except for the French grouping with South America.

The choices were rich vs poor, male vs female, legal pedestrian vs illegal, human vs animal, old vs young.

The scary unstated assumption is that the car knows how to categorize people.

In other words, autonomous cars are REALLY roaming Inquisitors, automatically sorting out the Keepers from the Tossers. When the order is given from Tesla Central Dreadnaught Command, the car will give up its normal compulsion to crash into long walls, and will joyously take out the nearest Tosser.

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Astrological sidenote: I've been pointlessly hammering on this topic for a long time. The two links I href'd above were the closest fit to this aspect of the problem. They were ALSO remarkably close to today's date. 10/31/14 and 10/27/15. Do I think the same way in the same week every year? Seems likely.

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Doublethink sidenote: We know that the pogrommers who design this code are constantly dealing with those binary categories. Male vs female, old vs young, rich vs poor, globalist vs Deplorable. We ALSO know that the same pogrommers firmly believe the standard leftist delusion that categories do not exist. Anyone can be anything. It's just a matter of momentary decision, not a matter of genes or even epigenes. Pogrommers who do not share this orthodox belief are kicked out.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Ethics

  ¶ 3:20 PM