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Comment by zhanwei | Hacker News Reader

He is comparing situations where human decision makers are highly trained professionals such as astronauts and passenger plane pilot to daily driving situations where the average human decision maker is more likely to be an idiot(people switch off while driving) distracted by his smartphone.

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Astronauts and pilots also switch off. It's not a function of training, but boredom and/or distraction.

Which only strenghtens the argument for self-driving cars. Hell, we even make those highly-trained professional aviators and astronauts depend on auto-pilots because it's much safer this way.

So long as the self-driving car can cover every situation. What doesn't work is a system that expects the human to sit idle for hundreds of hours, then suddenly throws him/her the wheel and jumps ship. (Like the autodrive system in that simpsons episode where homer becomes a trucker.)

I agree. Self-driving system that expects humans to take over randomly every now and then when something unexpected happens is much more dangerous than 100% self-driving or no self-driving - it exposes only the worst aspects of human driving while removing the best.

That's not completely clear. It depends entirely on how often the human is expected to take over

Basically, the less often the worse. If it's like once every 5 seconds it's fine. Once every 5 minutes, it's dangerous and annoying. Once every hour is a lethal idea.

I was thinking more like once every month

At this point you have to consider the thing 'Karunamon pointed out upthread. If, for some reason, you can't go full-self-driving and such system is safer on aggregate than having humans drive, then it's a good idea to implement it, even if suddenly handing over control once a month is an incredibly dangerous prospect (because with such timespans, the human will not really be expecting to drive and their skills will have atrophied).

I think a more important factor is what situations the human is expected to take over.

Car gets stuck in a cul-de-sac and can't get out? Sure.

Impending collision in 2 seconds? Bad idea.

That assumes the tech is crap though, doesn't it? I think there's a case to be made that once the tech has progressed enough, there will be fewer deaths/injuries overall even if some of the number has moved from the "human did something dumb" to "human couldn't take over from autopilot fast enough"

I think the danger is that semi-self-driving with occasional human intervention will be more dangerous than pure human driving. If the interventions are so rare that the average deaths/injuries fall below the current level, then of course we've made some progress. But hopefully by this time we'll be able to go full-auto. It's hard to imagine an extremely unexpected dangerous situation, in which giving control to human would be better than just making the algorithm try and recover.

full auto is not practical unless by full auto you mean the driver can opt-in at any point with a clear protocol for doing so.

I think the mistake people are making is thinking the vehicle is just going to be like 'welp, death imminent in 5 seconds, hairy pink skinned passenger, here ya go! do somefink abooot it!'.

In reality the vehicle is going to be assessing potential risk and let the passenger know when they need to be more attentive, even to the point of simply refusing to operate without the passenger signaling their attentiveness in some manner.

Yes, I think this is the key point. We've already seen [0] that even trained pilots have trouble when thrown into the middle of an emergency situation that they don't understand how they got into.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Capt. Warren VanderBurgh has held a bunch of lectures, some of which exist on youtube[0], where he keeps stressing this specific issue. Highly interesting stuff, even for someone like me who's basically never been in an airplane.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10

It's something that a lot of professions are specifically trained to avoid. Awareness is a hierarchy. No one can remain hyper vigilant all the time, but you can be trained to remain in a state of relaxed vigilance. In this state, you can react appropriately to situations and heighten your awareness state as the situation calls for it. If you are in a state of unawareness and are unprepared then your reaction to a situation that suddenly calls for heightened awareness will be very sub-optimal.

I think the issue with self driving cars that require a driver to be ready to step in at a moments notice, is that we, as a population are not trained to remain relaxed and aware at all times, nor is it reasonable to really expect most people to be able to do this.

Even a "switched off" human is benefiting from the supervision of a brain that is far more complex than any computer yet constructed, and has, on average, been trained in driving by decades of experience, and in recognizing patterns of movement by millions of years of evolution.

Meanwhile, computers in cars today cannot even reliably translate human throttle inputs into throttle actuations (see: Toyota).

A human brain is also more complex than a computer that can play chess, does that mean the average chess player can generally beat a good chess-playing software? More general complexity does not necessarily imply being better at a specific task - in fact, it can be detrimental.

That is not fair. The cars these days can and do it reliably, Toyota was an exception, not the rule. And the state of the art can only get better. A "switched off" human is useless and that creates suffering around it, why not avoid it if we can?

Let's be fair. Not much of our millions of years of evolution has fully prepared us to tackle the slew of random events and conditions the daily driver has to face. And while our hundreds of thousands of years of tool use has certainly managed to have some influence on our genome we're still barely equipped to operate tools that increase our speed, strength, and carrying capacity by orders of magnitude. This is demonstrated every day by the astonishingly huge number of terrible accidents caused by these tools. Automobiles are responsible for perhaps the most (no doubt due to the vastly varying levels of skill and practice across their operators). Human decision making is simply not fast enough to handle all of the situations one can encounter while operating a motor vehicle and is certainly many times slower in any given situation than a highly optimized specialized system designed to solve that type of problem. The area where human brains currently have the advantage is in reacting to novel edge cases, but at that point providing adequate autonomous conveyance at safer-than-human accident rates becomes a numbers game.

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