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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be really hard to get people to compare driverless cars with real humans, and not imaginary perfect drivers.

For another example, there's the nigh ubiquitous question of how to handle ethical dilemmas, like a crash where you have a choice between crushing a nun and crushing a baby carriage. Nobody ever seems to consider the fact that human drivers will almost never consider the ethics of the situation when choosing an outcome, and in fact probably won't deliberately choose any outcome at all, but will merely brake and steer by reflex.

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If you're ever driving in a situation where it is possible for a nun or baby carriage to jump in front of your car without any warning, you should be driving at 30km/h (20mph) or less. This gives you a stopping distance of approximately 1 car length, so stopping is always a better option than trying to steer around an obstacle. It also means that any collision with a pedestrian is highly unlikely to be fatal.

Of course, having automated cars driving at 30km/h through the suburbs is going to piss everybody off, but that's better than dead babies.

Grew up on a road where your choice is more likely to be one kid vs. another kid. Nobody drove 20 mph on that road. At least driverless cars will respect the speed limit. Human drivers do no such thing. While texting.

I'd wager a driverless car can afford to go a little faster, given its reaction speed is likelier much, much faster than anything a human can put out.

In fact, a driverless car may be capable of estimating its own stopping distance given road conditions and other measurements, account for some margin of error, and then use that to calculate how fast it can go down a road, while still adhering to the posted speed limits.

Passenger comfort is a bigger issue than the precise stopping distance.

If the human in the car isn't impatiently driving it, they'll probably be happier with a slower, safer, and more comfortable ride while they fiddle with their phone or do work on their laptop. Speed has no business, frankly, on residential drives. I don't think it even helps you get anywhere much faster -- it's more about venting schedule anxiety onto your gas pedal.

Porsche shoots past at 30mph over speed limit.

"He won't get there any faster"

(Yes, he will. It's pretty simple to work out exactly how much faster actually)

55 in a residenial zone? WTF?

It's not just about reaction time; 30 km/h is the limit where you can collide with a pedestrian and be fairly assured that the pedestrian will live. Above that speed survival rates drop dramatically.

The point of that often quoted ethical dilemma is that a human driver can't choose at all. With driverless cars at one point someone has to make a deliberate decision on how to act in these situations. Not in a split-second but rather in a long process. This results in different ethical considerations.

Sure, a human driver doesn't take any of the relevant factors into account. But a driverless car does and that's the difference.

It's usually presented as a "problem" with autonomous vehicles.

That's my point. People's expectations for driverless cars are vastly higher for no particularly good reason. Sure, a driverless car could potentially do a lot better than a human, but if it merely does as well as a human then it's already good enough here. You can slice the gordian knot of the ethical dilemma by saying "when presented with two bad choices, we'll pick whichever one is closer to the car's path" and it's fine. But people talk about it as a difficult problem to overcome because they're unwilling to accept human-level performance.

"It seems to be really hard to get people to compare driverless cars with real humans, and not imaginary perfect drivers."

I think this responsibility falls squarely on the manufacturers of autonomous vehicles.

I think only the people creating the technology really understand the strengths and weaknesses of software drivers compared to human drivers, and are responsible for educating law makers and the general public if they want their products to be accommodated in our laws, road ways, and market places.

I think journalists are responsible for understanding the facts and implications of what they discuss, regardless of how good the various players are at explaining it.

Yes, the manufacturers have a much stronger foundation from which to figure this stuff out, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't stop doing silly things like acting as if human drivers were perfect when talking about potential autonomous vehicle systems.

I think it's very difficult, though, to know what state of the art software driven vehicles are good at and not so good at, though. Maybe the missing-stop-sign-intersection was a problem in version 0.7.1 but fixed in patch 0.7.1.4.

Any good articles by engineers describing where current autonomous cars are still worse than humans? And which issues are just "bug that hasn't been fixed yet" vs. "we're still not sure how to solve this one in principle".

Agree, though, that a journalist should be interviewing real engineers and trying to summarize, paraphrase, and edit what he hears to the best of his or her ability, instead of just speculating.

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