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Comment by maxfurman | Hacker News Reader

Arguably. Tesla has not done a good job educating their customers on the limits of their "Autopilot" system, which has led to at least one preventable death.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/tesla_autopilot_dea...

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Is it possible to extrapolate from the recorded reduction in accidents after the introduction of autopilot and work out if fewer people have died as a result of introducing when they did?

Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate:

https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh...

The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes after Autosteer.

Would any of those crashes have been fatal? I don't have the numbers to answer that but I posit that introducing Autopilot has prevented more deaths than it has caused.

The utilitarian approach is such an interesting way to frame problems like this. It's obviously wrong for me to murder to my neighbor for their organs, even if those organs could save five other lives. But is it okay for a car company to roll out an AI program if it saves more lives than it costs? When viewed from afar the utilitarian mindset is always so alluring.

I think you're making a bit of a strawman here that people usually do with respect to utilitarianism. The utilitarian answer with 5 people on an island, where 1 is a doctor, 3 need organs, the remaining person has available organs, and the 3 are necessary to keep the group alive -- is to kill the one person and take their organs.

However, in a society where people can observe the actions of others and form motivations in response to policies, etc, you'll find that because society reacts fairly poorly to organ harvesting, because organ harvesting is implausible to do at scale without extra bad things happenning, etc, the utilitarian solution is actually not to go about doing it.

Only a naive utilitarian wouldn't try to also remain consistent with something like a Kantian imperative of global self-coherence.

Now, as for cars and testing self-driving on real folks, well, this may be something where the water is pretty murky. I think that society will react poorly enough to early bad events in self-driving that a measured approach is actually the best for saving lives in the long term.

The critique here shouldn't be that "well, utilitarianism sure looks good from afar, but would you murder your neighbor?" It should be "The problem is too difficult to address with utilitarianism because it involves complex societal factors and responses."

It's a bit contearian but if you will lose 100% of your population by not sacrificing 10%, then your scoiety is doomed in a way where normal ethics can't really apply. The guy refusing to give up his organs is going to be condemned as the naysayer nihilist who "wants us all to die".

I don't think replacing one set of risks with a smaller set of risks is at all morally similar to killing one person to save three.

A Kantian approach also works here though.

The person you're responding to isn't claiming that Tesla hasn't done a good job in the technology, rather in educating their users of its limits:

> Tesla has not done a good job educating their customers on the limits of their "Autopilot" system

The death was preventable, even with the technology deployed.

Where's the proof that it was a driver education problem? This argument gets rehashed every month or so here on HN.

Well, every time this discussion comes up, HN spends >100 posts splitting hairs as to what calling their system 'autopilot' implies.

Given that the technology is useless if you use it as 'intended' (Be aware, and in control of your vehicle 100% of the time[1]) I don't think this debate will be settled anytime soon.

[1] My 97 Avalon drives just fine when operated under those conditions.

Not to mention basing this on a single data point where a fatality occurred. How about the tens of thousands of other drives vs standard? That would at least be statistically relevant.

Even though what they released isn't a self-driving car but a glorified cruise control. I personally don't really see how that is reckless at all.

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