{"id":22480,"date":"2017-03-24T09:30:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T13:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22480"},"modified":"2017-04-02T06:18:19","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T10:18:19","slug":"accident-tourist-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/03\/24\/accident-tourist-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Accident Tourist: Driverless car crashes, ethics, machine learning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Street view, Calcutta, 2010.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

A<\/span>ccording to its author JG Ballard, <\/span>Crash<\/i><\/span><\/a> is <\/span>‘<\/span>the first porn<\/span>ographic novel based on technology’<\/span>. <\/span>From bizarre to oddly pleasing, the book’s narrative drifts from one erotically charged description to another of mangled human bodies and machines fused together in the moment of a car crash. The \u201cTV scientist\u201d, Vaughan, and his motley crew of car crash fetishists seek out crashes in-the-making, even causing them, just for the thrill of it. The protagonist of the tale, a James Ballard, gets deeply entangled with Vaughan and his ragged band after his own experience of a crash. Vaughan’s ultimate sexual fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. <\/span><\/p>\n

Like a STS <\/span>scholar-<\/span>version of Vaughan, I imagine what it may be like to arrive on the scene of\u00a0 a driverless car crash, and draw maps to understand what happened. Scenario planning is one kind of map-making to plan for ‘unthinkable futures’. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The ‘scenario’ is a phenomenon that became prominent during the Korean War, and through the following decades of the Cold War, to allow the US army to plan its strategy in the event of nuclear disaster. Peter Galison describes scenarios<\/a> as a \u201cliterature of future war\u201d \u201clocated somewhere between a story outline and ever more sophisticated role-playing war games\u201d, \u201ca staple of the new futurism\u201d. Since then scenario-planning has been adopted by a range of organisations, and features in the modelling of risk and to identify errors. Galison cites the Boston Group as having written a scenario – their very first one-\u00a0 in which feminist epistemologists, historians, and philosophers of science running amok might present a threat to the release of radioactive waste from the Cold War (“A Feminist World, 2091”). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The applications of the Trolley Problem<\/a> to driverless car crashes are a sort of scenario planning exercise. Now familiar to most readers of mainstream technology reporting, the <\/span><\/span>Trolley <\/span><\/span>problem <\/span><\/span>is<\/span><\/span> presented <\/span><\/span>as a series of hypothetical situations <\/span><\/span>with <\/span><\/span>different<\/span><\/span> outcomes <\/span><\/span>derived from a pitting of consequentialis<\/a><\/span><\/span>m<\/span><\/span><\/a> against deontological ethics<\/a>. <\/span><\/span>Trolley Problems are constructed as either\/or scenarios where a single choice must be made. <\/span><\/span>MIT’s Moral Machine project<\/a> materialises this thought experiment with an online template in which <\/span><\/span>the user has to complete scenarios <\/span><\/span>in which she has to instruct the driverless car about which kinds of pedestrian to avoid in the case of brake failure: runaway criminals, pets, children, parents, athletes, old people, or fat people.\u00a0 Patrick Lin has a short animation describing the application of the Trolley Problem in the driverless car scenario.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n