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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

> But must the standard for safety be higher than existing human drivers?

This is my line of thought as well. Same problem I have with the anti-nuclear environmental crowd. Are there substantial drawbacks? Absolutely.

That doesn't matter. The important question is not "Does this new technology solve all previous problems?" but rather "Does this technology solve a net positive number of problems while offering more opportunities for improvement?"

With decades of empirical data that average humans are pretty bad at reliably manually piloting powerful, heavy vehicles, I can't see a reasonable reason to reject deploying autopilot technology in an aggressive manner. And that sadly means a few deaths. But those should be measured against the number that would have died were nothing done, not against zero.

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> That doesn't matter. The important question is not "Does this new technology solve all previous problems?" but rather "Does this technology solve a net positive number of problems while offering more opportunities for improvement?"

To play advocatus diaboli: Shouldn't it be sufficient for the autopilot to be as good as the worst human drivers that we still let on the road? Or to sharpen the point: As good as the worst licensed drivers under human supervision (compare learner's permit)?

After all the technology is still "learning", under human supervision. And similarly a teenager having a parent as co-pilot does not only endanger their own life but also those of others too.

So if those are allowed on the road with the expectation that they'll get better and that giving them a licence will eventually have net benefits, shouldn't that apply to self-driving cars too?

If there are more Teslas than worst human drivers, that would be a net negative. The threshold should be that a Tesla must be at least as good as the Xth percentile, based on the number of drivers replaced. Or higher. If autopilot is instead replacing the best drivers, that's also a net negative.

Long haul trucking on routes with less than 2000 feet at each end off of a limited access highway could be automated very soon. The reduction in sleepy human drivers on the road would probably increase highway safety while saving companies money.

How do you figure? I don't believe there's been any interstate testing of automated driving on freeways with human drivers, let alone a standardized legal framework that would enable end-to-end automation.

Have you seen logistics centers in Texas? They are often out in the middle of nowhere, often with dead-easy access to the highway. Automating driving in those conditions would be much easier.

If nothing else, one could have "pilots" guide the trucks by remote control for the last mile.

My point was that it's not technology that will be the hard part, it's legality and unions.

If there are no employees, what say will the unions have?

There are far from no employees with about 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. A company cannot operate an automated commercial service today because there is no licensing system for driverless trucks. The unions aren't going to allow legalization of automated truck driving with that many jobs on the line.

You're not providing any argument for the ease of legalization here.

The unions aren't going to allow legalization of automated truck driving with that many jobs on the line.

The unions can only have direct leverage with companies that currently employ truckers and those that work closely with those companies. All it takes is for one tech company that doesn't fit into the above category to develop the technology, then the market will make the licensing of such devices inevitable.

You thought you were giving a clever rejoinder. However, I was specifically talking about companies that don't directly employ large numbers of truck drivers. Then it comes down to the economic power of the companies that operate the trucks versus the economic power of the companies that have to pay the trucking companies. The latter is going to win the lobbying contest by sheer size.

Sounds like someone should reinvent the railroad...

With the advantage that the Interstate can be used for the long-haul infrastructure, without having to build it yourself.

This.

Many people are unwilling to cede control of their automobiles even if the statistics support the case of their car being safer when driven autonomously.

The "infinite trolley" problem puts this into better perspective, IMO: https://backchannel.com/reinventing-the-trolley-problem-85f3...

Do you test the Autopilot feature? Wouldn't creating a much safer vehicle be real progress? How is it progress for a machine to decapitate you? What value is an Autopilot if it kills you?

> Do you test the Autopilot feature? Wouldn't creating a much safer vehicle be real progress?

What you don't understand is deploying a driving assistance feature is probably the fastest and most efficient way of improving the system because it is the fastest way to collect huge amounts of data. When used properly (As the machine reminds you each time you use it), it should always be a safer option than regular driving with the added benefit of providing valuable data to improve the system.

You should rephrase your question to: "What value is an Autopilot if it kills you when you use it in a way it explicitly told you not to?"

I can't think of too many recent ML breakthroughs that haven't largely come on the back of access to enormous data sets.

Interestingly, curious if that's why Tesla equipped cars with sensors before enabling autopilot as a user option. Hypothetically, can't see why they couldn't have downloaded the autopilot code to cars and been running it in ghost mode while users drove, generating faults whenever errors were encountered and sending the relevant sensor data back home.

There's no reason Tesla/MobilEye couldn't be using an off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm, no.

You assume a lot about my understanding.

Deep plowing was probably the fastest and most efficient way to farm the Great Plains because you could quickly and easily turn up huge tracts of fertile land.

Then the dust storms came.

What value is an Autopilot that knows you are not using it the way you are supposed to, but keeps accelerating you anyway?

> What value is an Autopilot that knows you are not using it the way you are supposed to, but keeps accelerating you anyway?

Good point. An autopilot, whose sole purpose is learning, should make sure the user is engaged so it's provided correcting feedback.

This kind of deeply emotional knee jerk response is why this discussion needs to be left to scientists and statisticians.

Hilarious. Asking questions (which you have not even bothered to answer) is an emotional knee jerk response...contrasted against science and statistics!

Seriously. You used the word you over and over. Yes, of course I don't want to be decapitated. That's irrelevant and an appeal to emotion. What is important is: what are the odds of getting decapitated while driving vs. autopilot.

I used the word three times. All in highly relevant questions.

>What is important is: what are the odds of getting decapitated while driving vs. autopilot.

Such odds are pretty much impossible to calculate. We know of one instance where a Tesla intentionally drove into a situation where decapitation was inevitable. It happens to manual drivers as well, but not typically without additional circumstances (high speeds, prior crash/accident). Usually if your head is about to impact something, you will react quickly enough to save it.

> Usually if your head is about to impact something, you will react quickly enough to save it.

That's is patently false since 30K people die in car collisions every year in the US alone. Stop focusing on the anecdote, the one death, and look at the numbers.

> I used the word three times. All in highly relevant questions.

They are all irrelevant because they focus on the one, the individual, the act, the emotional.

That's not how good policy is made.

I don't know where you are coming from, but the individual is the most important consideration of any policy.

>They are all irrelevant because they focus on the one, the individual, the act, the emotional.

I can parse this sentence, but I don't know what it means. The act, the emotional?

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