Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

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>It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars

What. "Acceptable losses" is, and has always been the rule when it comes to accidents in all cars, ever. We've made absolutely massive safety improvements in the last few decades, cutting the death rate to around 1/3 of its historical maximum, yet even so tens of thousands of people will die in America alone this year (probably in the neighborhood of ~30k). And next year. And the year after. According to the World Health Organization, there were 1.25 million road traffic deaths in 2013, and if anything I'd expect that to have continued to rise as more and more people worldwide gain access to vehicles.

Yet we will absolutely continue to support car use, because flexible mechanized point-to-point personal transportation is insanely valuable to us (and in fact American society at least simply could not function without it at all at this point). You can dress it up however you like, but the objective fact of the matter is that literally millions of deaths are considered "acceptable losses" here.

Full automation represents our absolutely best shot to reduce the horrendous, annual loss of human life. So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral. You've invented imaginary "rights" that absolutely do not and should not exist. Your so called

>"blind push forward at the expense of human lives"

is literally the opposite of what automation aims to accomplish. And I will freely assert will accomplish, because humans are awful drivers. Really, automation is merely filling in the missing piece of personalized transport that we should have had from the start, except that our mechanical technological development was far ahead of our information gathering and processing technological development. Having a human handling that has always been a hack, and getting rid of it has such vast positives that it absolutely justifies a very strong push forward as soon as possible. Every year without driverless vehicles when we could have had them is literally hundreds of thousands more people dead.

This tech does not exist in a vacuum, and context absolutely matters.

> So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral.

How do you counter a utilitarian argument without humanizing the situation? If my friend or loved one were killed by an ill-considered and poorly-implemented automated driving algorithm, no amount of statistics would convince me that the tradeoff was worth it. Who bears responsibility in that case? No one? I suspect that ordinary people won't accept that for a long time to come. At least with human drivers, the courts can decide culpability. At least with a human in the mix, we're all still operating within the same social and legal order.

Is your friend/loved one more valuable than the 90 other people who die in automotive accidents (in the U.S. alone) daily?

Your attempt at "humanizing" the situation is merely being dismissive of the values of others' lives.

Everyone who dies is special and important to someone. To wring your hands and rail against utilitarianism is to try and apply tribalism to moral reasoning.

Because this person matters more TO YOU, you're suggesting that we should treat them as if they matter MORE THAN OTHER PEOPLE.

That seems to me an intrinsically selfish -- possibly even narcissistic -- view.

> Is your friend/loved one more valuable than the 90 other people who die in automotive accidents (in the U.S. alone) daily?

To me, the key factor is blame. Who do we fault in an accident? We can't imprison an algorithm or put it in jail. But we can implicate a careless driver. A loved one should not have to die because a truck happened to be the right shade of white — not without much discussion and the possibility of legal recourse.

There are many horrible, systemic things we could do to improve the lives of the majority at the expense of a few. In the end, we usually determine that the rights of individuals outweigh the utilitarian benefit. Does the same reasoning apply to self-driving cars? I don't know. If the technology proves as safe as people make it out to be, maybe things will end up OK. But it's not a closed case by any means.

We can't put a prematurely-worn brake line in jail either.

An algorithm cannot BE "careless", in the legal sense of the word. You are comparing apples and oranges. Carelessness (negligence) is a different problem than a design flaw.

An algorithm may be flawed, in which case blame lies with the companies involved in creating it and putting it in peoples' hands. Similarly, any mechanical component of a vehicle can be flawed -- and many can cause an accident if they fail. The companies responsible are legally liable already.

> In the end, we usually determine that the rights of individuals outweigh the utilitarian benefit

Cars. Airplanes. Vaccines. All of these benefit the majority at the expense of a few.

The idea that there is no liability here is absolute and utter NONSENSE. Minimally, Tesla can be sued for the flaw in their product and the harm it caused.

How is a death with the possibility of legal recourse any better than one without?

As far as I see, the point of legal recourse is to deter it from happening in the first place, I.e. it is purely consequentialist. If you reject such consequentialist thinking, what's the point of having someone to blame?

Who do we fault in an accident? We can't imprison an algorithm or put it in jail.

No, but you can sue the company that built the faulty product, and in certain extreme cases imprison the responsible individuals.

rights of individuals outweigh the utilitarian benefit

What rights are being violated here? People are choosing to use unproven technology, which actually appears to be approximately as safe as humans driving.

>How do you counter a utilitarian argument without humanizing the situation?

Have you considered that perhaps there is no argument to be countered? That your entire foundation of "humanizing" the situation is foolish and off base? Alternatively, you yourself blithely dismissed the fact that your "humanizing" easily works both ways, in fact more easily works the other way: many of us have had friends or loved ones killed by driver error, tiredness, drunkeness/distraction, or in simple accidents, deaths that would not have happened if a computer had been in control. I don't need any "what ifs" because one of my friends was killed by a drunk driver right near her school. Those millions who are going to die have friends and loved ones too you know. It is in fact a statistics game, and one of economic tradeoffs. That's human life, in fact life in general.

>no amount of statistics would convince me that the tradeoff was worth it

Which is why we do not leave societal decisions to you, but instead have a system that attempts (with varying success in some cases) to put significant distance between the moment-to-moment emotions of specific individuals and enactment of law governing all. You may not care about this imaginary tradeoff of your loved one vs thousands of other people's loved ones, but those other thousands of people certainly would. So you can and should be outvoted.

>Who bears responsibility in that case?

It would depend. If it was just an honest mistake that could not have been reasonably caught, then the answer is "no one" and it'd just be covered by insurance, or even the government, so you could say that "society itself chooses to take responsibility for the greater good". We already have a model for this in many, many other scenarios because the basic issue here is very much not a new one. A big, successful example would be vaccines, where we all have to take on a small risk for a very great general good and there is government provided compensation in the rare case that something goes wrong. However as far as individuals go, sometimes there is in fact no one "at fault" or responsible. It's human to always want something to blame but part of maturing is accepting that freak risk is a fact of existence.

>I suspect that ordinary people won't accept that for a long time to come.

We literally do accept it, and have accepted it for all of recorded history. Much of mythology comes out of the basic recognition that there are forces beyond humanity.

>At least with a human in the mix, we're all still operating within the same social and legal order.

Debatable, but also beside the point and it doesn't change the objective fact that a human in the mix is a proven recipe for failure. Your philosophy is cold comfort in the face of tens of millions of deaths. You are also ignoring the large percentage of deaths that are purely down to things such as animals crossing the road, or poor driving conditions that are not reacted to appropriately, or where a driver kills themselves (and perhaps passengers) due to human failure but involves no 3rd parties, which automation could also positively effect.

You're also ignoring positive utility, which is a critical component to the economic and societal equation just as the car itself is. Self-driving cars change the dynamics for city space usage, for people who are unable to drive due to age or medical conditions, for the poor who cannot afford the capital outlay of a full car, for those who are discriminated against by human drivers, for the environment (long charging times for electric vehicles become significantly less of an issue when the vehicles can simply go take care of it themselves while you're doing something else), and on and on. It's hard to overstate how central this is to society up and down the stack. Your viewing lens is entirely too narrow, which is precisely why individual emotional response is a terrible basis for governance.

Nowhere in my original comment did I make the case that self-driving cars should be pre-emptively banned, or that I personally should have any say in the matter. Believe me — I am all for the legal system (and "society") determining the future of this technology. But at this point in time, I am not convinced that people against this future would, in fact, be out-voted. And if that turns out to be the case, it would do little good to belittle their very reasonable reservations.

You're also forgetting that the dream of safe and ubiquitous self-driving cars is still unproven and far in the future. What we're actually dealing with on the ground is a dangerous, nascent, and hype-driven technology that relies on a human fallback and has the power to kill.

If you are any example, then the reservations are unreasonable and there's plenty of precedent for ignoring them.

We didn't ban vaccines because a handful of people are harmed, and we're not reconsidering their use because a bunch of mathematically illiterate loons think they're more dangerous than the alternative.

Frankly, there's more reason to ban PEOPLE from being able to drive a car than to ban AIs from driving them -- if only because AIs can be improved and people cannot.

All the ignorance of probability, moral philosophy, economics and law will not change the fact that the posture you are arguing from is one of preserving a status quo that costs dozens of people their lives every day.

Sigh. OK, look. Your inflammatory rhetoric is exactly the sort of thing I was trying to warn against, but I guess self-driving cars are part of the political shitpile now, too. It's a shame that important issues like this seemingly cannot be discussed without resorting to tribalism and name-calling.

We're not in your imaginary super-safe self-driving future yet, and if lives are to be carelessly sacrificed as stepping stones on the way there — because Tesla decided to beta test some dangerous software on actual, real-life roads — it is never going to happen. No matter how much of a utilitarian benefit there might be in the long run.

Nobody who works on safety-critical systems is an idiot incapable of imagining or caring about the consequences of their errors.

Your ignorant, fact-free fear-mongering is antithetical to saving lives.

1. An immense number of lives are being "carelessly sacrificed" right now, and will continue to be sacrificed every day until something comes along to fix the fundamental problem: People are terrible drivers. 2. Tesla's system did not override control of the vehicle. It was not presented as being safe or ready to operate without oversight. The law does not allow for it to be treated as such. The driver failed to hit the brakes despite being told by the car -- and by legal obligation -- that it was his responsibility to hit the brakes. 3. Tesla's system has proven to be safer than the average, unassisted driver, to date.

If the proportion of accidents involving Tesla's autopilot remained constant when scaling up to more drivers and more miles, then it would be a net win in terms of lives saved to deploy it widely right now.

Obviously though, nobody -- including Tesla -- expects that to be the case, or they'd have been touting this as something every driver should have RIGHT NOW.

Tesla is doing their public beta precisely because it's impossible to design a safety-critical system with perfect foresight. More information is needed to help them build a robust system and the public beta has proven to be an uncommonly safe and effective way to get that information.

If you think my rhetoric is inflammatory it's because you're blind to the logical consequences -- the human cost -- of what you advocate for.

>> And I will freely assert will accomplish, because humans are awful drivers.

If humans are such awful drivers and replacing them with automation is the moral thing to do, why is it not the moral thing to do to stop them from driving altogether, right now and for the time being, until we have automation that is better than "awful"?

If we're such rubbish drivers that we'll always kill others if we're driving, why are we allow ourselves to drive?

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