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Comment by crocal | Hacker News Reader

No personal opinion here. It's just facts from the only ones around who have done this before. Your argument is flawed. We have also been there. Here is the catch. You are willing to take the risk, but society as a whole will not. As soon as you release /total/ control to a machine, public authorities having authorized this become responsible for your life and those your car may threaten. Requirements for said authorities to accept such things will be staggering.

In other words, it is you that is taking your own opinion for the universal truth. You reason in a model where the driver is the only responsible party for reckless driving.

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I'd disagree here too. Trains and planes have extremely catastrophic failure modes, while cars do not. Cars have the added benefit of being able to quickly come to a stop in most situations.

An even bigger driving factor (pun intended) will be that the cost of a driver relative to operation is much, much higher in a car. A solution that is better on both safety and cost will be quickly adopted.

For the first paragraph, I don't understand the logic behind your comparison between a train failure mode and a car failure mode. However your assumption on braking capability is wrong and it is a crucial point.

It does not matter how well your car can brake. Can your autonomous driving system guarantee it will always brake as hard and as fast as required when you will need it? Can you guarantee that the system will not have a bug the day it needs to brake?

Trains brake very well. There are even rubber wheel metros that brake so well we have to limit them in order not to sent everyone flying in the wagons :).

But in the safety calculations, standards like IEEE 1474 assumes degraded braking capability, and also considers that the preceding train is at stop. In other words, to be declared safe for mass usage, you can't assume average case. You must assume adverse case. You will not have a driver to notice that the car brakes poorly or to be confident enough to drive very close to the preceding car.

For the second paragraph, again, this is certainly true for driving assistance, but will most likely not be enough for driverless, as it was / is not enough for trains. Of course you may disagree.

EDIT: this is a good reference: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/safe-braking-model-explained-...

dude. this is not logical. if a system kills less people, we should use it. otherwise, you're just choosing to kill more people for a false sense of authority/security. not only foolish, but i resent that you believe you can make the choice for others.

you are using appeals to authority and emotion rather than the scientific method.

He's arguing from a position of someone who's familiar with the socio-political process. It's a different axis than technical arguments or ideological arguments.

I have no substantial comment other than to note that when a driverless car is insurable by Liberty Mutual at normal rates, with all liability held by Tesla, then it's probably reasonably safe.

Maybe autobuses would be the difficult medium — disastrous consequence of failure with at least the same operational complexity as cars.

However I don't see how the fears of an industry that needed to have extremely good results immediately need to be extended to one in which all signs point to progressive improvement. The danger being that the general public is fast to jump on blind trust, but to be compared with a vastly different ratio of number of people who are / can be in control to number of people affected, at least for cars and trucks which as far as I know are the first POIs in this industry. Autobuses might get automation slower than the rest of the fleet (no source, just from the top of my head).

A 5x reduction in accident rate(plus the convenience of self-driving) , advertised and lobbied in the right way, can be translated to a huge political power. That could, with time, convince authorities, And that wasn't the case in the other systems you mention.

"Huge"? Are you so sure?

First, you do not need self driving car to achieve 5x improvement. Good driver assistance systems will get you there.

Then, put yourself in the choose of the politician that is authorizing this technology to be used massively. Picture the amount of cars that are going to run everywhere once this authorization is given and ask yourself: what will happen to him once the first hundred people have died because of a wrong autopilot decision (it will be such figures, since you are OK with x5 reduction). Do you think he will be sleeping well at night? Do you think his political career will be better, especially if you consider my first point? Would you step in his shoes?

> just facts

> You are willing to take the risk, but society as a whole will not.

What are you talking about? People very objectively ride planes that are not completely safe. Airlines that are nowhere near completely safe still get tons of customers.

Planes are not driverless. This is what I am talking about.

Oh, I thought you were accepting the characterization of planes as the gold standard. Because planes have the same scary part, of giving up control.

But more importantly a couple paranoid regulators don't really represent "society as a whole", so you're not drawing on particularly relevant experience here when you talk about something as locked-down as rail or planes. With the constant looming death toll of human car crashes and state by state regulation there's a lot of room for getting these systems on the road.

Aerospace is the /absolute/ leader for driver assistance. They have decades of experience, especially in the field of ergonomics and brilliantly crafted semi-automated procedures[1].

But in the end, we all accept the risk of riding planes that we don't control because we entrust our lives to /trained pilots/ not because of such systems. As an illustration, the debate is still vigorous about whether or not a computer should be allowed to sit betwen the driver and the actuators [2]. It is also the case for cars, especially after the Toyota blunders [3] so I do believe all this body of experience is relevant and cannot be easily "disrupted".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy... [2] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/149/what-are-th... [3] http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...

facts? Do you have sources?

The requirements for safety in railway are well defined in EN 50129, EN 50126 and EN 50128. You will be required to meet these standards for an ISA (independent safety authority) to give a positive report, and then for the applicable transportation authority to grant revenue service authorization. As you can imagine, the willingness of a given passenger to take a certain amount of risk is not part of the process described in these standards.

EDIT: theses standards are applied worldwide, despite the EN prefix.

EDIT: good reference site: http://en50126.blogspot.it/2008/07/velkommen.html?m=1

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