The Worth of a Dilemma
I listened to a podcast today on “Radiolab” ( https://radiolab.org/podcast/driverless-dilemma-0923 ) that dealt with research on the so-called “trolley problem.” Briefly, it is an ethical dilemma in which someone sees a trolley in the distance bearing down on a group of five people. If they throw a switch at this minute, they can save the five people, but there is one person on the part of the track to which the train will switch who will die if you do it. Do you hit the switch? The podcast considered brain research that has been done on what parts of the brain activate during this problem and what parts activate when asked the same problem but one is required to push someone onto the tracks. The show then applied this to questions about AI in driverless vehicles. The whole thing just didn’t sit quite right with me. I got to thinking about it and realized that what I didn’t like was the whole idea of creating an ethical dilemma. At the heart of a dilemma is that you have to ch...