Self driving cars crash five times as much as regular ones | Hacker News Reader

Self driving cars crash five times as much as regular ones

fortune.com

6 pointsabhianet14 comments

>Still, in spite of the self-driving cars’ high accident rate, the University of Michigan study did not contradict the conclusions of Google GOOG 0.56% and the DMV: The authors agreed that self-driving cars were not to blame in any of their crashes

That's little consolation when you've just crashed.

And it basically translates in that they're not very good (compared to humans) in handling active crisis situations on the road, where another driver took a bad turn, there was some obstacle, etc.

>Finally, self-driving cars actually have a lower fatality rate, with zero deaths resulting from their crashes

Obviously, since they have not driven even 1/100.000 of the miles that regular cars have had.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2015/10/30/9640230/self-drivi... "Most of the accidents happened because another vehicle rear-ended the self-driving car. Self-driving cars have not been involved in any head-on collisions, and crashes involving self-driving cars were less likely to cause injuries than crashes involving conventional vehicles — just two out of 11 crashes led to injuries, compared with 28 percent of conventional vehicles."

It's hard to say "you've crashed" when you've been rear-ended.

IMHO autonomous driving systems still do not mix well with humans on the road. Could even say they are not compatible with each other. With how things have been going, soon we would have systems predicting behavior of human driver for safer driving. But by then, roads will have humans, systems predicting human behavior and systems released between the two without prediction.

I am of a similar opinion. People have been talking about self driving cars for years, but for some reason as soon as people hear that Google is developing them its assumed they will be a reality in the near future.

Likewise there is lots of talk about automation of jobs, which in a way is happening, yet at the same time we seem to be working harder for more hours than 20 years ago.

With you until that automation thing. The reason we work harder is, most jobs are automated. The remaining ones are paid a lot, so they try to pack in as much as they can to make the whole process cheaper. They'll automate these jobs too as soon as they can.

Upshot: if you have a job, you're working harder because automation.

Thats a very simplistic view and you seem very sure of it. (Plus in the there are a lot more crappy McJob's, so your point about the remianing jobs being highly paid doesn't really seem true).

We haven't seen flying cars, and there is no expectation for them in the future despite what we all expected years ago.

Have read of David Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules". As he correctly points out there is a hell of a lot more beurecracy and form filling for almost everything these days. That's a large part of where the extra work comes from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

How about not guessing and reading the statistics:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-tec...

The article is hardly conclusive evidence. It even says so for the last three paragraphs.

Obligatory Graeber takedown links:

http://www.annleckie.com/2013/02/24/debt/

http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/archi...

Did you even look at the link I posted? Those articles are both talking about his other book, not the one I was referring to.

So what: "falso in uno falso in omnibus" is a motto worth thinking about. If someone writes absolute hogwash in one book, how can you expect that anything he writes after that will have any trustworthiness?

https://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9567289/driverless-truck-rio-...

From the article: "The big difference is that the mine setting offers a huge advantage that most companies can't match — there are no human drivers on the road."

The article title is poorly written: the cars were at fault in none of these accidents. Most of these accidents were cases where the self-driving car was rear-ended.

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