Re:Uber Neglected Simulation Testing on Self-Driving Cars, I...
by ksk on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @01:11PM
(#17348420)
>we could just as easily go the other way: "It is completely unethical and immoral to delay technology that has the potential to save lives."
No, you couldn't "just as easily" go the other way. Those are not identical positions. My position promotes caution over over-confidence. Further more, the "potential to save lives" is not the exclusive domain of autonomous vehicles. So nobody is "delaying" saving peoples lives. Various methods that can be utilized to reduce causalities that do not rely on technology that has not been shown to work in a conclusive fashion. Planes were unproven tech at some point, and people rightfully refused to fly in them, and they aren't as unsafe now. Technology gets better, and we can hope that autonomous vehicles would get better too.
Everything "has the potential to kill people" if you put enough of it in a box and drop it from high enough. The question is how much potential, and compared to what. If we want to use strong moralizing language like this, we could just as easily go the other way: "It is completely unethical and immoral to delay technology that has the potential to save lives." That would be true in exactly the same ways, which is to say, it's complicated and we need to avoid moralizing.