"Women and Children First"

As we approach autonomous cars, some have posed the question "In accident avoidance should the car prefer its passenger or the pedestrian?"  It is posed as a difficult ethical dilemma.  I even heard an engineer suggest that not only does he not want to make the decision but that he would like Congress to make it as a matter of law.  

This is really just another instance of an ethical dilemma that humanity has faced forever.  It has many illustrations but one that has been used in teaching ethics is called the "life boat" problem.  If there is not enough room in the lifeboat for everyone, who gets in?  If there is not enough food and water, who gets preference?

The simple answer is "women and children first."  Human drivers will steer away from a woman with a baby carriage even if they do not have time to evaluate the alternative.  It is built into the culture, all but automatic, but the reason is that it is pro life.  Children are the future of the species.  Women can nurture and reproduce.  Men can sow but they cannot reap.  While the male role takes minutes, the female role takes months.  Life needs more females than males.

The reason that we do not apply this pro life rationale to the autonomous automobile is that we assume that the consideration is beyond its capability.  However, most of what one expects of an autonomous car today was beyond its capability a decade ago.  For the moment, most may not be able to consider all the factors we might like.  For example, they may not recognize age and gender, much less consider them.  Ten years from now, they certainly will.  

In this context it is useful to consider how such systems make a decision.  They identify a number of scenarios, depending upon the time available, assign an outcome and a confidence level to each, and choose statistically.  The kind of ties implied by the strawman dilemma will be vanishingly rare, even more so as the computers become faster and the number of things the can consider increases.  

Compare the autonomous car to the human driver.  In the two tenths of a second that it takes a young adult to recognize and react, the autonomous car will evaluate dozens of possibilities with as many considerations.  Like the human driver, the autonomous car may confront instances when there are simply no good options but the whole reason for using them is that they are less likely than the human driver to overlook the least damaging.  

The Role of Risk Assessment in Digital Security

The very idea of Risk Assessment has always been controversial.  I have been engaged in the controversy for fifty years. My ideas on the subject are well considered if otherwise no better than anyone else's.  I record them here.

I attribute the application of this idea to what was then called Computer Security to my mentors, later colleagues, Robert H. Courtney, Jr. and Robert V. Jacobson.  They did it in an attempt to rationalize decision making, more specifically the allocation of scarce security resources, to the then nascent field.  They did it in response to their observation that many, not to say most, security decisions were being made based upon the intuition of the decision maker and their belief, and a tenet of this blog, that security is a space in which intuition does not serve us well.  They wanted to bring a little reason to the process.

They could not possibly have known that in a mere fifty years that the resources applied to this effort would grow to the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, that the safety and liberty of the individual, the health of public and private enterprise, the efficiency and resilience of our economy, and the security of the nations would turn on how effectively and efficiently we used those resources.  

So, at its core risk assessment is a decision making tool.  It is a tool that we use to answer the question "where to spend the next dollar of our limited resources?"  Courtney's Second Law says one should "Never spend more mitigating a risk than tolerating it will cost you." We will, do, make this decision, with or without tools.  We make it intuitively or we make it rationally but we do make it.  

At its most elaborate risk assessment is a very expensive tool requiring significant knowledge, skill, ability, and experience to use, more than most of us enjoy.  It should be used only for expensive decisions, decisions that are expensive to reverse if we get them wrong.  At its simplest, it protects us from making decisions based solely upon the threat, attack, vulnerability, or consequence de jour.  It protects us from intuition, from fear.

All that said, few of us are confronting expensive or difficult decisions, decisions requiring sophisticated decision making tools, risk assessment or otherwise..  We have yet to implement all those measures that we know to be so effective and efficient as to require no further justification.  They are what Peter Tippett calls essential practices.  Anyone can do them, with available resources, they are about 0.8 effective but work synergistically to achieve an arbitrary level of security. They fall in that category that we call "no brainers."  All we need is the will.