I am aware of the trolley problem simply because I researched A.I. and how they will be used in Automated Driving for a sci-fi story I was writing at the time.

I don't think your average person would know this though, so you're going to have to spell it out more in the script. It has been mentioned in a few TV shows/movies but always with an explanation. I don't know how you are going to get this across before the end as is, but you need it.

I think the concept is a great one and I'd suggest ditching the trolley problem aspect and come up with some other way this A.I. could outsmart the gangster without killing everyone.

Sci-Fi, deffo. Within the next 50 years = yes. Budget? Yes. Horror? No.

Great concept though, just needs work.

-Mark

First of all, thank you for not writing the max pages.

Hmm, ok, I love the idea of a futuristic trolley. Seriously, something about that visual is great to me.

I don’t really understand this story though. The red lights threw me off completely.

Not really a horror. Some interesting ideas, and an interesting character (no clue what a snakehead is, but I like the sound of whatever “tayo” is. Sounds like something I shouldn’t be saying, but nevertheless…)

Kind of a weird script tbh. Didn't feel like he got his comeuppance or anything. There was some cool ways this could have gone, but it went nowhere.

Haha, I liked it and it kept me guessing -- the writing's good (the one little catch was with the junkie getting shot, which I had to re-read) -- but I'm not sure the revealed premise passes the sniff test. This has to be the most wasteful and costly, least efficient city management program of all time. I was left waiting for the second reveal that it's all in VR.

EDIT: a lot of comments suggesting this isn't horror. It clearly is. It starts out with a scary situation (mother and toddler trapped on a train car with a dangerous person) and morphs into true sci-fi horror with the final reveal that innocents, too, can be (and presumably routinely are) sacrificed to this system.

This has lots of potential but I don't think I get the whole story.

Hmmm...no, I haven't heard of Trolley Problem and I still don't know what that means.

Sci-fi box checked. Horror box? Meh, not so much. Near future, absolutely.

Opening line - "it" - "its'".  What is a Snakehead?

So far, this is very dumb to me.  The dialogue is laughably unrealistic, as is the entire setup.

No...not good.  Very little effort I can see here, and what I do see makes little sense.

*

Hi everyone,

This script was mine. As some of you guessed, the lack of clarity was due to being rushed (as opposed to my usual problem of being over-length and cutting badly). I appreciate all of the reads and feedback.

There was quite a bit of confusion on terminology because I just didn't do a good job explaining.

A Snakehead is a Chinese gang/gangster involved in human smuggling.

I got a chuckle thinking that Tayo might be a dirty word. He's the main character of a cartoon full of talking buses.

Apparently the Trolley Problem is not as well-known as I thought. Doesn't help that there was a typo so "the" was missing. It was originally a thought experiment carefully contrived to make different branches of ethics give different answers, but has gotten a second wind in discussions of autonomous vehicles. In this story I put a literal trolley in the Trolley Problem.

My plan (cut short by time) was to have the trolley explain to Snakehead that it's constantly making predictions about human behavior such as manually-controlled vehicles and kids in crosswalks. And about sixty seconds ago it used its road rage algorithm to predict that bringing him to a station would result in at least six fatalities.

As for the ending, you're unfortunately seeing my first draft distracted by budget concerns. I was trying to think of how it could be shot in a stationary trolley car, then have sped-up footage of approaching the end of the tunnel. Windows were tinted so there'd be no need for scenery zooming by the windows.

Sorry that I didn't spell out explicitly enough what actually happened story-wise: the trolley ran itself full-speed into a solid wall to kill the five passengers rather than risk a mass-casualty event. Adding "CRASH!" after CUT TO BLACK probably would have sufficed.

I immediately thought of two plot holes: First, couldn't fore-warned police find some way to neutralize this guy? Hard to explain in natural-sounding dialog that the police's hands would be tied until he actually opened fire. Second, does one guy with a pistol really pose that big of a danger? That's fair; he should definitely be more heavily armed in a revision.

When I first started typing, there weren't going to be any "innocent" victims to keep with the norms of horror, but I thought that would give the impression the trolley was weighing who is and is not important to society. Thus the toddler to illustrate this is cold, hard math. The metric the trolley uses might be raw fatalities,  quality-adjusted life years, an American version of a social credit score, or most likely a half-baked algorithm slapped together on a lowest-bid government contract. There's a hint of this in I, Robot where an android can only save one of two people, and it picks the one with a higher chance of survival.

Part of the discussion about autonomous vehicles and the Trolley Problem is when fatalities appear unavoidable but there's some ability to affect who dies, does the vehicle have any special duty to its owner or occupants?

A disturbing factoid comes from some actual experiments with robots tasked with saving humans from harm (simplified environment where there is only one potential harm). Protecting one human is fine, but when two humans were in peril simultaneously the robot often froze with analysis paralysis. Points to a need to think about decision criteria ahead of time.

Thanks again everyone. I will be trying to fix this up a bit when I have some time.

Quoted from FrankM Thanks again everyone. I will be trying to fix this up a bit when I have some time.

Had a bit of time and fixed up the script.