SDS PODCAST EPISODE 148 FIVE MINUTE FRIDAY: THE TROLLEY PROBLEM Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 1
This is Five Minute Friday episode number 144, two things to remember and two things to forget. Welcome back to the Super Data Science podcast, and today I've got a concept, a phrase that really resonated with me, and I would like to share it with you. So, I was listening to a different podcast, I was listening to Lewis Howe School of Greatness podcast, episode number 608. If you haven't heard Lewis Howes podcast School of Greatness, I highly recommend check it out, you can start off at this episode, 608. It's with Jay Shetty. Jay is a guy from London who went and lived as a monk in India for three years, and then came back, and now he's teaching people the things that he learned. Mostly through videos, so you may have seen his videos on Facebook or YouTube, they go viral, they get like 50 million views. So you may have actually already seen a couple of his lessons that he's shared. And in this podcast, there's lots and lots of valuable things that they discussed, and lots of valuable knowledge that he shared, especially wisdom from his time as being a monk. But one thing that really resonated with me, and I remember I was walking onto the tarmac, off the plane onto the tarmac, and for me, when something resonates with me, when it really sticks in my mind, I can remember the location where I was, it's just how my brain works. And I can clearly remember that I was getting off the plane, and walking onto the tarmac to get to the bus that takes you away from the plane. And I heard him say this, so here we go. What Jay said, and what he learned, one of the things he learned as a monk is two things to remember and two things to forget. So let's go through this, the two things to remembers are always remember the bad you've done to others, and the good others have done to you. So, again, always remember the bad you've done to others, and the good others have done to you. Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 2
And he explains it this way, that by remembering the bad you've done to others, you will always feel grounded and humble, and you'll never let your ego get over you. So as soon as you start thinking how amazing I am, or how great I am, and how I'm achieving success, or I'm doing so many great things, all it takes is to remember what bad things, what have you done that's bad, and you've done it to others in your past. When you were younger, or years ago, or months ago. And we all have moments we're not proud of, we all have moment which we might even be embarrassed by. And so keeping those in your memory actually helps you to control your ego, to always realize that we're all not perfect, that we all make mistakes. That we all need to work on ourselves constantly to become better and better, there's no stopping with that. And it really keeps our ego under control, or helps keep your ego under control. And the other one is to remember the good things that others have done to you, and by remembering the good things others have done to you, you're always going to feel grateful. So those are the two things to remember. Now, the two things to forget, forget the good things you've done to others, and forget the bad things others have done to you. So again, forget the good things you've done to others, and forget the bad things others have done to you. And the reason for that is if you don't forget, like if you keep thinking about the good things that you've done to others, then you will get fixated on that for too long, and again, your ego is going to grow from that. So if you just keep remembering how you helped that old lady cross the street, or how you donated $200 to charity, or whatever it was, if you just keep remembering that all the time and fixating on that, that's just going to perpetuate that feeling, and it's going to enable your ego to keep growing all the time, and you don't want that. So, once you've done a good thing, there's no need to constantly be proud of it and remember it all the time. It's okay to forget that. And forget the bad things others have done to you. Why should you forget that? Well, he also Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 3
explains it in a way that you don't have to necessarily become their best friend after that, but the reason for that is that if you keep thinking about the bad things others have done to you, and you fixate on that, you're just going to drain your energy forever. You're not going to be able to look forward, not going to be able to live life in the present, and move on with your life, you're just going to constantly lose energy because of something that happened in your past. And sometimes it's necessary to forget those things. So there we go, that's two things to remember and two things to forget. Always remember the bad things, the bad you've done to others and the good others have done to you. And forget the good things you've done to others and the bad things others have done to you. Something to ponder on this weekend, once again, it's from the Lewis Howes podcast, episode 608, make sure to check it out if you're interested to learn more of Jay Shetty's teachings and wisdom. And I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead and you've got some plans, or even if you don't, I hope you have a quiet one, and have some rest. I look forward to seeing you back here next time, until then, happy analyzing. This is Five Minute Friday episode number 148, The Trolley Problem. Welcome back to the Super Data Science podcast. Today we're going to have an interesting, and at the same time, controversial discussion. You probably have heard that you need to surround yourself with amazing people, with interesting people that you want to be like, learn from, and therefore you will grow. I try to do that in my own life, and one of these amazing people in my life introduced me to something that is very exciting, and it's called the Radiolab podcast. It's a podcast which you can find on itunes, and I'm assuming that since you're listening to this podcast, you are interested in podcasts, so definitely check it out. Radiolab is a high-production show that does research into current topics, or any kind of different topics that are interesting, that are exciting, and Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 4
they produce them with very high quality, great audio, great audio effects, lots of guests, lots of different comments from different people that are cut into the episodes. The research is very deep, so so far I've listened to two episodes. One was about gun control and that one was an hour long, and they went through the whole history of the second amendment, how it only actually started being interpreted as it is now in the 2000s. This whole interpretation actually started in 2008, as I believe, after a case in Washington. Before that, there was something happening in 2001, and then they went to the history from the 1960s, so it was a really cool episode. Today, I listened to an episode called... What was it called? Let me quickly have a look, Driverless Dilemma. The episode was called Driverless Dilemma. What they were talking about is what I wanted to share today. I'm only going to share a snippet of what I learned. If you want to learn the full story and all the research, like they talk to an MRI scientist and research the human brain on this subject, then check out Radiolab. But let's get started. We're going to talk about the driverless dilemma. Actually, we're going to talk about the trolley problem, which is part of the driverless dilemma. The trolley problem goes like this. You are standing on a trolley, which is going down some train tracks. Along those train tracks, ahead of you, there are five workers working on the track. They're facing away from the trolley, they cannot see you coming, and they cannot hear the trolley, and you cannot yell out to them. If you do nothing while on this trolley, then what'll happen is that all five workers will die. On the other hand, it so happens that on the trolley near you, there's a lever, and if you pull that lever, then the trolley will divert onto some side tracks where there's only one worker, and that worker will die. In this case, your choice is A) do nothing and five people will die, or B) pull the lever and one person will die. Question is, what will you choose? Think about it for a second and just have your answer with you. I really wonder Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 5
what you selected, because when the guys from Radiolab asked this question from, I think it was random people on the street, 90% of the people said they would pull the lever. They would kill one person instead of killing five. They basically would pull the lever, kill one, instead of do nothing and kill five. Then, we go to part two. Now imagine you're standing above the train tracks. You're standing on a bridge that goes over the train tracks, and you can see the trolley approaching, and it's going to, as soon as it passes the bridge, on the other side, it will kill... passes under the bridge, it will kill those five same workers. The only thing you can do now is, again, the two things you can do, you can do nothing, version A like last time, and it will kill the five workers, or version B, there's a... You notice that there's a large man standing near you, a large person standing near you on the bridge, and what you can do is you can push the large person off the bridge onto the tracks. He will die, but he will stop the trolley and therefore save the other five people. The question is will you do A, nothing, and let five people die, or will you do B, push the large person off the bridge onto the tracks, and thereby stop the trolley and kill that one person, but save the five? What's your instinctive response here? Let me guess, probably you're going to say no, you're not going to push the person. Why can I guess that? It's because when the guys from Radiolab did the same survey, but with this question, most people, 90% of the people said that they wouldn't kill the person, because in this case it really feels like murder. It feels like you're murdering a person, even though you're trying to save five. Very controversial topic, very controversial question. Good thing that it's just theoretical. It's just theoretical, we're never actually faced with a choice like that in life. This is something that we'll just contemplate about in the trolley problem. But the thing is, why it's now become current, is because of the proliferation of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are starting to pop up. Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 6
There are already self-driving Ubers which you can take. By 2021, certain companies in Germany are going to release self-driving cars for sale to the public, so you can actually... You'll be able to own self-driving cars, might even happen sooner with other automobile manufacturers or companies in the US. This is the future we're going into. Self-driving cars are going to have to have pre-programmed algorithms that will allow them to make choices like that. For instance, if there's people on the road, pedestrians on the road, if there's five pedestrians on the road. Let's think about this theoretically. Again, they gave this example in the Radiolab episode. There's five pedestrians on the road, and there's a self-driving car coming towards them. Should the car kill the five pedestrians, or should it run into a concrete wall, and thereby kill the passenger of the car? Those are the only two options it has. The circumstances are such that there's nothing else it can do, and it can only decide between the two. How does it decide? What is the correct decision? Most people answer to that question that it should sacrifice the person inside the car. It should sacrifice the passenger in order to save five people. Sacrifice one life in order to save five. But then, when those same people are asked will you buy a car like that? Will you buy a car that is pre-programmed to intentionally kill you in order to save more lives than just one, most people said no. Most people said they won't buy a car like that. Now, we have a question of morality, and also how are these companies going to be perceived by the public? Are people going to actually buy the cars? Are they going to be perceived as moral or amoral, and so on? All of this ties in very intricately into the question of ethics in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, because these questions, they need to somehow be addressed in advance. They cannot be left up to some programmers who are creating these algorithms to decide this on the spot. These things have to be thought through not just at a company level, they should be thought at a national level, or even a global level. Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 7
For instance, Germany's one of the first countries that has passed a law, as I understood from the podcast, that they've passed a law that addresses the issue of discrimination, that autonomous vehicles should not discriminate between people on any basis. They should not discriminate based on gender, on race, on age, on social status, on income, or on anything like that. Yes, that is indeed a possibility that, for instance, self-driving cars could discriminate potentially even on things like income level of a person, because eventually they'll be able to communicate with each other. They'll have so much data about us that they will know who's sitting in Car A, who's sitting in Car B, and potentially they could make these decisions based on who has a more affluence status in the socium, or who is younger, or who has a... Maybe somebody has a terminal illness, and those might not be ethical things. While there's no right or wrong answer right now, that we can think of, these are things to keep in mind and to consider, and this is where the world is going. Self-driving cars, they're coming into our lives very rapidly, and these are questions that we will need to be addressing. There's something to ponder on, something philosophical to think about. Maybe a topic starter for you for this weekend, if you're going to be chatting to some friends, or going to an event, social gathering, or something like that. See how people react to the trolley problem, or the driverless dilemma. Of course, if you're interested to learn more, highly recommend the Radiolab podcast. This was Driverless Dilemma, which was released on 27 September, 2017. The episode is 42 minutes long. Highly recommend checking it out if you're interested to learn more, and understand not only philosophically what's happening, and what the dilemma is, but actually from a neurological perspective, what happens in the brain, because they talk to a scientist who's put people into an MRI machine and studied their brain when they were answering these questions. Plus, there's some more interesting questions that are discussed in the show. All right. Hope you enjoyed this short excurse into the world of philosophical debates and autonomous vehicles that are going to be more Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 8
and more current in years to come, and I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing. Show Notes: http://www.superdatascience.com/148 9