Hacker News Reader

Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

There are more questions that arise from this. For example if Intel were more vigilant and this lead to a 10x reduction in technological progress (CPU power has increased exponentially), how many lives would have been affected or even lost because cutting edge research that relies on super computers would happen 40 years from now?

If by making CPUs more secure, self-driving moves 30 years into the future, how many lives will this affect?

There is an old joke, about Bill Gates saying that if the automotive industry could move as fast as the computer industry, we would had $100 cars that do 1000 miles to the gallon and the GM chief answering that whilst these cars would exist, they would crash twice a day.

View on HN

I'm very happy for self driving cars to move 30 years into the future if that means not leaving their CPUs open to known vulnerabilities.

1.25 million people die in auto-related accidents each year. That's one person every 25 seconds.

If you are willing to delay the onset of self-driving cars by 30 years, that's a lot of blood. I agree there is a balance point that's not 1.25x30 million - some will still die after self-driving cars are introduced. There may even be some vulnerabilities exploited (but I strongly doubt that hacks will amount to anything approaching 1.25 million people per year - the media will hype up crashes where the self driving car or its security system was at fault as if it did, while ignoring the everyday fatal accidents with nothing except maybe an advisory to avoid that road on your morning commute). And as critical safety issues like maximum speed enforcement, drunk driving enforcement, helmets on motorcycles, seat belts, and child restraints trickle down into developing countries and older used cars, the number per year will - I hope - drop.

But one or two more have died somewhere since you started reading this comment. Still want to delay it?

Everyone dies exactly once, no matter what they do, so I question whether driving causes any deaths at all. I think the comparison might need to be put in terms of quality adjusted person-years of life lost or something. People get tunnel vision when focused on optimizing a certain metric. If nobody was driving, how much would life expectancy go up?

That only strengthens the argument.

People die from heart disease, cancer, respiratory failure, Alzheimer's, strokes etc. in old age. Reducing one of those factors would give few additional high-quality person-years of life. Auto accidents bring death to younger people who, in the absence of that catastrophe, would be expected to live many more years.

Vulnerabilities always get used. There's no way forward that doesn't include more vigilance.

This is certainly true, the difficult part is to find a middle point between vigilance and sufficient progress rate.

Sometimes though, you can work in parallel. A consumer-grade CPU may for example be used in a airtight setup when increased security is needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com