HOT

I work on very large (30+ tons) custom mining equipment that rotates side to side. One of the machines had its center of gravity above the axis of rotation. On it passing a certain point, the machine started rotating down on its own and almost smashed into the ground next to us. The spring applied brakes engaged and stopped it about 10in of the ground! If it had hit the ground, a multimillion dollar, one of a kind piece of equipment would have been ruined!

Depends on the bias of the programmer or just be random due to the impossibility of making a correct choice. If we haven’t been able to solve the problem, a robot will never unless it knows something we dont (in this hypothetical, not an option) or is able to take an action we could not.

It’s such an absurd situation that I don’t think it is constructive to consider. There are always more options in reality than a binary choice, and likely even more to a machine who could consider so many more inputs so much faster.

In the end, an accident is just that, an accident. No matter how well you consider all possibilities and design contingencies, there is always risk in everything. After an accident, we assess what happened and modify our assumptions about the probability of the event repeating, and make changes to reduce the odds of it happening again.

That said, if someone makes a mistake that leads to the robot switching the track from an empty one to one with people, that’s not an accident and someone fucked up royally