Hacker News Reader

> including a little javascript widget

This is great. You can make any model say anything you want by tuning the parameters, so we needs researchers to stop forcing their preferred parameters, and let consumers check the robustness of the conclusions against ranges of parameters

> if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people?

and if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing?

> if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people?

with a handful of centralized systems responsible for every accident everyone will be permanently panicked and outraged at its purportedly uncaring, greedy overlords.

> if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing?

counterfactuals need to be near and specific for people to give them much thought, see:

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/Roese1997...

http://www3.canyons.edu/faculty/rafterm/0%200LLI%20LOVEandLO...

> Crucially, this study models scenarios such as AVs being _half_ as safe as human drivers

See, this is the main reason why AVs are great: accidents are caused by speeders, drunk, tired, inexperienced drivers, morons driving while high on pot or ecstasy, that is, those who are MUCH worse than an average driver used as a yardstick to measure the performance of the autonomous cars.

Replace them by an imperfect machine lacking common sense, and the overall driving skill still goes up.

The "replacement" implies that people you mentioned want to be replaced. I don't think that's the case; speeders will just disable AI and crank up the speed themselves. People who are reasonable enough to activate AI when they are drunk will probably just order a taxi now, and so on. The only way to have that "replacement" is to force the autonomy on drivers, but that's not gonna fly well on a market.

> The "replacement" implies that people you mentioned want to be replaced

Not the entire world is America. Oftentimes "want" is replaced by "forced".

> Another question: if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? I have no answers to these questions... it's a hard problem.

We already have analogous situations with things like airbags. Airbags unarguably save lives, and yet they've also unarguably killed kids.

How many of those deceased children would have survived the collision if no airbags were installed?

Self-driving cars preform predictably under a set of conditions. The primary problem arises when the car, for whatever reason, doesn't correctly detect that it's in an unfamiliar condition and continues moving as normal. Humans are intelligent enough to notice when something is "off".

For a machine as heavy, large, fast, and close as a car, limited intelligence is not enough.

Another quesion: if somebody you loved was killed by a driver's human error (quite possibly their own), would you be angry about the delays in making autonomous cars available?