Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
At some people you will run out of people to tie to the tracks.
How many branches is that going to take? Just out of interest.
2^33 is approximately 8.5 billion, which is roughly the population of the world.
So the 32nd person decides to either kill half of humanity and end the scenario, or give someone the power to end human kind...
This is really the only answer. The only thing that makes it "hard" is having to face the brutality of moral calculus
Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
The thing to do is kill now even if it's thousands. Because it's only going to get worse.
The best time to kill was the first trolly. The second best time to kill is now.
Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.
If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you're actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.
Very interesting one!
Eventually there might also be a track with no people on it so postponing the dilemma becomes much better than at least 1 death. But there is no way of knowing what the future dilemma might be.
Ok, let's take a finite but very long track, such as a million long and instead of having the amount of people on the track double it increments.
Do you trust 999 thousand other people to not decide to pull the lever? Remember each one has to also trust all the people in front of them
You gotta double it until it overflows to negatives, then you end up reviving billions of people!
And so you end up driving up food and housing demand, with no guarantee that the revived population can provide to the supply side. :P
Billions of zombies.... that then feast on the living. This could be the worst outcome.
If I must kill 1 person or cause even more death, I suppose I'd kill the person responsible for this scenario.
Successfully explained climate change
Gotta find the person tying everyone to these tracks and take them out
Continuously double it so that the trolley has as much room as it needs to brake to a complete halt, therefore killing 0 people.
The real questions are, "Who is fueling and piloting the trolly, and can we kill them?"
Math-wise, it won't take long until they are tied to the track with us and everyone else.
Jesus took the wheel
Seems like exactly what politicians are doing. Pass the problems along to the next one.
Easy. I'd just step in front of the train.
People always miss the bigger picture with these things. Why do these trolleys' brakes keep failing? Is it a design flaw in the braking system? Is the maintenance crew severely underfunded? Is it a slippage problem due to improper rail maintenance? It's a shame we can't even organize a work stoppage to sort this out since congress blocked the trolley union from striking...
Considering someone is tied to the tracks I’d assume it’s sabotaged
this is not a purely theoretical question. in practice, autonomous vehicles face exactly this dilemma. or rather the manufacturers of the vehicles who have to set the specifications
I forget where it was from but years ago I found an online survey on autonomous cars and their decision making from a university. It was all about deciding to swerve or not in a collision. All kinds of difficult encounters like do you hit the barrier and kill the passenger or swerve and kill the old lady? Do you hit thin person or serve and hit the heavier person?
I've never seen a survey drill down into biases quite so deeply.
Easy. Prioritize who is saved based on social credit score.
From what I've seen of real world examples, not "what if the car had 5 cats in it and the person on the crosswalk had a stroller full of 6 cat, swerve into a barricade?", telsa cars just release control of the autonomous controls to the person behind the wheel a few seconds before impact so the driver is fully liable.
I did this as a part of our ethics discussion.
My eventual answer was you always kill the non-driver as no one would ever buy a car that will kill them over someone else.
Kill 1 person. I feel it would be cowardly to pass the buck and risk killing 2.
Addressing Climate Change.
Hey, once we reach a psychopath that is problem solved
Sunk cost fallacy, just pull it on one person instead of doubling the potential deaths and giving up control over when it will happen.
I'd try to talk to the person on the track to see if they were an asshole and decide from there.
How OSHA violations are born.
So how does that killing thing work, doing it by yourself or just thinking and the person dies?
As the famous Double Down Domino would say, "I'm doublin' down!"