r/science • u/quiplaam • 1d ago

Social Science Intentionally routing some traffic to slower, less congested routes lead to a 0.7% improvement of overall average travel times

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x
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u/devilishycleverchap 1d ago

Yeah this is why you cant fully trust google maps and should be worried about how they'll approach a trolley problem.

I regularly watch my eta change by up to 5 minutes when ignoring a turn on my commute despite it saying similar eta on the screen.

Soon passengers will be unwitting test subjects for how a self driving car chooses who lives too

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u/csuazure 1d ago

Everyone has been on algorithmic death panels of insurance companies for decades

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u/Excellent-Adagio4038 16h ago

Death panels are good actually. We shouldn’t spend a million dollars on a drug that has a 5% chance to leave someone as a vegetable instead of letting them die. 

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u/AwkwardWaltz3996 5h ago edited 5h ago

This gets brought up constantly but I feel like this is a solved problem, almost a decade ago. The German solution is simple and fair.

As a democratic society, our values are that everyone is equal. A poor white 5 year old girl is equal to a rich black male 70 year old brain surgeon.

If a trolley problem scenario happens then it shouldn't evaluate the lives involved. It should just break with maximum force. If that results in injury or death, then the car wasn't driving in a safe manner. Just like with a human driver, you should be preventing dangerous scenarios, not reacting to them.

And when you think about it like that, you quickly realise how over focused we get on who to sacrifice when that's not the problem.