I cannot recommend this enough. A true, honest, and sober look at the choices we have ahead of us as a species. (Author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, two books I highly recommend).

Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide | Yuval Noah Harari

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E

I forget sometimes how much I love early IDM.

This song always reminds me.

A smooth, syncopated ambience that brought the analogue machines to life.

(B12 / Redcell - Gimp)
#IDM

https://youtu.be/HGYSbT9yyQs

https://youtu.be/YAoC7FOaL40

But even so, this is something *some* people greatly fear and will make political grandstanding about to further agendas, or even just simply to make money off the controversy.

Don’t be distracted from the ramifications of the coming tsunami of innovation by the small, passing, thunderstorms of those that continue to look toward the past with harmful nostalgia.

There are better, and real, questions to answer, and they are being considered right now.

Making a global standard for these kinds of decisions is a good thing, but this also can be seen as another step closer to a globally-shared culture, further elevating GLOBAL society above towns/countries/divisions.

The same has already occurred with the banking system, the global telephone system, and of course the most impactful to date, the Internet.

But, there will still be deaths inside, or involving, autonomous vehicles. And there will be cases (have already been…) of litigation, blame, suspicion, and skepticism about the morality or effectiveness of the programming and design of these types of transportation.

There will be some growing pains, some controversies, but the currently HUGE number of people that are hurt or die in car accidents globally will plummet-to literally ALL TIME LOWS.

Cars have only become safer as the years have gone by, and this will be a quantum leap of safety in (probably) less than 20 years' time.

They can see in the dark.
They can see in radar.
They can see in lidar.
They can see in infrared.
They can see in ultraviolet.
They will be MUCH MUCH better drivers than the vast majority of human drivers right now.

Autonomous vehicles know a lot more about themselves than previous cars did: They are supercomputers on wheels for the most part). As such, they understand the capabilities of their own systems better than the vast majority of human drivers.

They won't exceed operational limits the way we all have in the past with our own cars - whether intentional or otherwise.

Also, they don't get drunk
or high,
or sleepy,
or distracted by text messages,
or emails,
or Facebook.

Now – a reality check:

There will be FAR FAR FEWER deaths attributed to transportation accidents once that even a 20% minority of moving vehicles on the road are autonomous (trucking will be early adopters, Teslas and Benzs can already drive themselves NOW, etc.).

This is because autonomous vehicles have also been coded by a team of programmers to keep safe distances and speeds relative to other cars and people.

So, just think: Right now, there is a programmer making algorithmic models for a swath of societal, industrial, medical, and governmental professionals and experts to discuss, consider, and synthesize a homogeneous standard of "who likely dies" in a huge variety of situations.

No business, organization, or government will have their own standard.

This "shared-standard" also will certainly be demanded by the Insurance industry players so that it will greatly reduce the internal actuarial overhead of a huge number of standards and variables to calculate and maintain for the coming autonomous machine insurance categories.

There is no right answer in all cases to uncountable scenarios - So there is a consortium of experts from many fields coming up with a shared, consensus-based standard against which to code all autonomous system algorithms going forward (hopefully).

After some trials in the real world, negative and positive outcomes are observed, and case law begins to fill in the question marks, it is more than likely that a single, shared algorithm for this kind of decision will be a single global standard:

There are competing schools of philosophy here.

There are also competing decision-making processes biologically baked into our genetically shared frontal lobes about right and wrong, about self-preservation vs. greater good of the group/tribe/town/species, etc.