Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

> Humans are terrible at driving cars: that’s why 35,000 people were killed by them in the US alone in 2015.

Ahg misleading numbers. People are actually surprisingly good at driving. Wikipedia says that the US driving fatality rate (which is worse than most other countries) is "7.1 road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km". You can tell it's low because it's measured in "per billion vehicle-km".

EDIT: When I said "misleading numbers", I should have said "misleading units". The number 35k people killed in 2015 measures part of the toll that driving takes on the human race, and it is terrible. However, the units of deaths/year is not a measurement of how good or bad people are at driving. Deaths/mile-driven is such a measurement.

View on HN

I think these 'humans are terrible at driving' statements, while true, also forget to mention that 'computers are also terrible at driving'. There are near infinite edge cases in driving a vehicle, and I have yet to see any convincing proof the current machine learning efforts are truly up for the challenge. Edge cases are where computers fail: That general intelligence they're missing is needed to decide what to do. Even Waymo is offloading that to a call center of remote drivers. Humans can definitely be faultier at consistent driving in a way computers are not.

I think the ideal case remains investing in safety systems that ensure inattentiveness of a driver doesn't cause an accident, while still leaving the human in control of the ultimate decision making of a vehicle.

Presumably, computers can get better at driving cars while humans cannot, so eventually computers will win this particular competition like they've won on chess, go, and tons of other things.

Chess and go are closed systems. And humans can get better at driving, especially if they have better tools. And really, if you want to maximize safety, you can just make cars safer and slower. Then it won't even matter how good of a driver you are.

But what computers are good at is not getting drunk, tired, and distracted.

You have hit the mark. And it isn't just exceptional circumstances; there is a skill and expectation distribution amongst human drivers that can be eliminated here.

We don't really care about the best human drivers. The challenge is preventing the worst human drivers from sitting behind the wheel and eliminating edge cases where an otherwise competent driver is not fit to drive due to some personal circumstance.

To piggyback off what you said -- "best" is much harder to define in driving compared to chess and Go, because those games have a much more defined victory condition than does normal driving. How do you "win" at (non-competitive) driving? A driver with a 0% accident rate might not necessarily be better if they drove at a speed of 0.5 mph.

OTOH, I could reductio, humans can get better at language translation, while computers cannot.

Think of it this way: driving is a translation problem.

Why can’t computers get better at language translation?

I translated many Russian scientific journal articles to English via Google Translate, and the improvements since 2015 are striking. A friend of mine pointed out that might be largely due to the corrections I provided. Either way.

Well, I've been using Google translate to translate small sentences of Greek to English and back and the results have been consistently abysmally bad since the start (whenever that was- I can't say I remember; but before 2015 anyway).

Indeed, they demonstrably have over the last decade.

Humans can get better at driving. Instructional campaigns, assistive technology, art, these things can all make ya better.

Sure, but when you fix a bug in the driving software you deploy it to all cars simultaneously. It's harder to teach all humans about a corner case you encountered only a couple of times.

Similarly, all your cars can decide slamming into a wall at full speed is a good idea; they all run the same software.

In 2018 it is still easier to teach the humans as a point of fact.

Ok but, isn't it fair to assume we're already doing everything we can in that regard? There's only so much energy we as a society can invest in making better drivers. AI seems to have no limit to speak of.

Ridiculously expensive for only a marginal improvement, and then people still have their hard wetware limits of concentration and reaction time. Machines have orders of magnitude better reaction time, are always 100% focused, and on aggregate, are much cheaper to teach.

If society makes driving safety a priority, it can be made really, really safe.

For example, school buses are the safest mode of transportation of any kind whatsoever in the US. Millions of kids ride naturally millions of miles per week and fatalities per year are usually in the single or double digits.

Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough. Most accidents happen as some combination of people in bad mental states, equipment in bad conditions and bad stuff like weather.

Remove that and driving is something people are pretty reliable at doing - especially, people don't really need faster reaction time 99% if they drive sensibly.

http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-res...

School buses are also more or less a long tank. They are built like rolling fortresses, they weigh a lot, and they are going to "win" any collision with anything less than a train most of the time. (You do not need the kids to wear seatbelts because, again... really nothing is going to stop that bus.) I saw an the remnants of an accident between a car and a school bus once. The car was smashed to bits. The bus did not look like it had been hit.

This, of course, doesn't scale. If everyone drove buses then buses would not be as safe. And let's not even talk about gas mileage...

I don't think GP's point is really about buses. To quote:

> Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough.

There is something to that. We let people drive cars after close to zero training (something I personally find to be completely ridiculous, but the world is what it is...), and then we let them drive without any direct consequences of not paying attention (penalties for breaking traffic laws are absurdly low, and enforcement way too lenient). For the other extreme, compare with professional pilots.

That said, I feel that getting all cars self-driving will be much easier to achieve than restructuring society around professional driving only, or training every driver properly and giving them appropriate incentives.

Reaction times is not all you need to drive safely though. You also need situational awareness, which means an understanding of your environment. Which machines can clearly not do at all, yet.

Until AI can develop an understanding of the world that is on par with that of humans, it will remain unable to tackle the breadth and variety of situations that humans can.

Chess, go and tons of other board games. Outside of that very limited sort of activity, computers have "beat humans" in maybe machine vision and speech recognition, but then again only on very strictly defined challenges. And once the same (kinds of) systems are deployed in the wild all sorts of tiny little details emerge that suggest maybe the computers are not so ready to take over the world, yet.

Like, oh, I don't know- adversarial examples fooling state-of-the-art machine vision systems, or speech recognition failing for all but a very few target languages etc.

The only metric which matters is fatalities per billion km, which is lower for machine drivers.

While I agree we should control for distance when comparing humans to machines I think we should also compare the type of driving. Are machines safer at driving on ice? How many human-driven fatalities happen on ice or in inclement weather?

On ice... Or driving without secondary human intervention. When a human is intervening every 1-1,000 miles do we really know how machine driven fatalities compare to human driven fatalities?

So far we have metrics on how autonomous driving fatalities where the machines are treated like a student driver in limited road conditions -- they don't drive in the rain and an instructor is ready to take over.

I wonder how the fatalities per billion miles compares between autonomous systems vs student drivers in driver's ed. I don't recall a story about a driver's ed fatality and there has probably been a lot more miles in drivers ed than autonomous miles.

> When a human is intervening every 1 1,000 miles do we really know how machine driven fatalities compare to human driven fatalities?

Do you think remote drivers can intervene so fast as to prevent a crash? I think it's only useful when the car is blocked in traffic in an unusual situation, such as when something happened to the road, or there is a protest, or something like that. SDC's should be able to stop on their own when a dangerous situation appears.

Waymo likes to play up statistics that don't matter. For instance, most of their "hundreds of thousands of miles driven" statistics they brag about in every press release constitute driving around the same handful of streets in Mountain View, CA. They don't experience variety of driving, just... the same set of roads repeatedly. In a place with ideal weather. And they can tick up a disengagement count to prevent an accident whenever they want.

The statistic we deserve is "contiguous miles driven without intervention", and it needs to be spread across a large geographic area (something Waymo cars are completely incapable of right now due to their mapping requirements).

Only if you assume that the miles are equivalent, but they aren't. The machines are handed the easy work because that's what they're currently good enough at handling, and they have a human standing by to take over at a moment's notice.

So by your rationale, we should be deploying self-driving cars now? Because AFAIK, the number of fatalities per km for cars classified as self-driving is zero, especially if you ignore all the accidents in which the human participant tried to intervene. Which of the self-driving car companies do you think would argue that their cars are now safe for general usage?

Does anyone have data on the average income or vehicle prices related to these deaths? How many accidents are being prevented by new currently available safety technology (proximity and blind-spot warnings, etc)? It's not like the advent of AI cars means that everyone just gets one, so this number isn't going to go down significantly unless you force poor people off the road by mandating that only AI get to drive or else give everyone an AI in their car for cheap.

Personally, I don't think the people driving this vehicle AI revolution really care about that number though. It's just what gets wheeled out to appeal to the public in order to justify the next luxury car industry for rich people who want to travel worry-free while intoxicated/sleeping/working/netflixing and to reduce the labor cost in all transportation services from trucking and busing, to operating construction and farming equipment.

The lives AI will save will be rich ones, and the lives that are ruined from increased insurance premiums (by not having an AI vehicle) and the destruction of entire labor markets will be poor/middle-class ones.

Is there a solution I'm unaware of? Is UBI going to cover those costs? Or is the rising inequality and resentment just not a concern since the AI will just solve that next?

Don't worry, the SDC sensors and hardware will be cheap, and software open sourced soon enough. It will be a technology for everyone like the cell phone - even the poor will have equal access. We're good at making cheap hardware, and there will be a push to make it available to everyone.

A RAND corporation study quotes similar data:

But is it practical to assess autonomous vehicle safety through test-driving? The safety of human drivers is a critical benchmark against which to compare the safety of autonomous vehicles. And, even though the number of crashes, injuries, and fatalities from human drivers is high, the rate of these failures is low in comparison with the number of miles that people drive. Americans drive nearly 3 trillion miles every year (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2015). The 2.3 million reported inju- ries in 2013 correspond to a failure rate of 77 reported injuries per 100 million miles. The 32,719 fatalities in 2013 correspond to a failure rate of 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...

re: your edit; it's not necessarily true that deaths/distance is a better way to assess how terrible humans are at driving. People who are able to drive many miles (relative to the average) likely drive regularly on the interstate, which has been designed to make driving as decision-free as possible, even at high speeds.

Maybe the author's fault was to use deaths as a metric when accidents would have been far more telling of how frequently humans commit errors while driving, especially the kind of errors that computers do not make. Namely, computers make far fewer errors the more regular and controlled the operating conditions. Humans, on the other hand, can get into even more accidents the closer they are to their own home.

But there needs to be some normalization because machines drive many fewer miles. How do you suggest we normalize the number of fatalities for the sake of comparison?

But the OP doesn't argue that machines currently have a better fatality rate. And so it's seems nonsensical to say that his use of the fatalities/year metric is more "misleading" compared to fatalities/km.

The OP used the fatality rate to say that humans were terrible at driving, because so many fatalities occur out of basic, preventable human error, despite all of the money and research and policy invested. And the context of the comment is in pointing out human fraility when it came to consistency at mundane, mechanical tasks.

I would agree that the OP's use of fatalities is perhaps sensationalist. His point would have been far more clearer if he talked about all kinds of accidents.

On what basis do you say that the OP's numbers are "misleading"? What's the objective benchmark on what number of fatalities/accidents is acceptable per billion miles?

Also, fatal accidents are not the only kind of error possible when it comes to driving.

> On what basis do you say that the OP's numbers are "misleading"?

It's misleading because of the units its presented in: deaths/year. Those units measure (part of) the cost of driving on the human race. They do not represent how good or bad people are at driving.

> What's the objective benchmark on what number of fatalities/accidents is acceptable per billion miles?

I don't mean to say that the current number of deaths is OK! I want cars to get safer. However, when you say "people are bad at driving, and kill 35k people/year", it sounds like it's a low bar for self-driving cars to pass. However, when you say "people kill 7 people per billion km driven", it's clear that the bar is high. Tesla Autopilot has killed 2 people so far (I believe?); has it driven 280 million km?

> Tesla Autopilot has killed 2 people so far (I believe?); has it driven 280 million km?

Ha, what? Tesla Autopilot cannot kill anyone. The drivers of those cars are responsible, not Tesla. You are making things up. Tesla has been very clear that you are responsible for the vehicle when Autopilot is engaged. It is not a self-driving car.

Also this is nonsense:

> It's misleading because of the units its presented in: deaths/year. Those units measure (part of) the cost of driving on the human race. They do not represent how good or bad people are at driving.

Deaths/year is a perfectly valid way to measure and discover that humans are bad at driving. If humans were not bad at driving, that number would be a lot lower, close to 0.

Also,

> However, when you say "people are bad at driving, and kill 35k people/year", it sounds like it's a low bar for self-driving cars to pass.

No, it does not sound like a low bar to pass. Driving is hard.

Granted, the choice of metric and scope of measurement is as much an opinion as concluding that humans are "terrible" at driving, but I still don't see how OP's choice of metric was more misleading than yours. And Tesla is not full-AI/automated, nor do I think the OP argued that Autopilot or any AI system was any better than humans.

I think you misinterpret the OP if you think he was making the case that self-driving cara have a low-bar to pass. It seemed to me that his whole spiel is that AI is a very difficult thing, and that the issues about AI and self-driving are not just about technology.

To be fair, the OP's phrasing is open to interpretation. I see him arguing that humans are bad at mechanical consistency, and this is most evident in driving because driving is a highly mechanical activity that most of us do. That more of us don't die is because of the many decisions made outside of our control. Not just automotive tech, but law and policy and zoning decisions that reduce the frequency and variety of scenarios in which we have to make a split-second reaction.

Uh, no...

> You can tell it's low because it's measured in "per billion vehicle-km".

No, you can't tell it's low because of that at all. What it means to be "good at driving" is entirely relative, just as what it means to be "low" is.

7.1 fatalities per billion vehicle-km is still a lot if you expect there to be 1 fatality per billion vehicle-km... Or if you expect there to be 0... The general idea is that machines could get that number much lower, and so - if that's your measurement of quality - are much better...

> Ahg misleading numbers. People are actually surprisingly good at driving.

What? No they are not. If that were true then hundreds of thousands of Americans would not die due to car accidents every decade. Just because there are hundreds of millions of us does not make us good at driving, if we 'only' kill tens of thousands per year.

> You can tell it's low because it's measured in "per billion vehicle-km".

You can tell that the CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is low because it's measured in ppm. Not something we should be concerned about, right? And when we increase it by a few hundred ppm, no big deal right?

What? You are the one driving misleading statistics around. You are the one diminishing the lives of those murdered by drunk drivers. People are dying every day because humans are really, really bad at driving.

Let's say this again. People are not surprisingly good at driving. People are very very bad at driving.

Are humans good or bad at driving? Until a few years ago, humans defined entirely what "driving" was. Now two things can drive, humans and the autobots. Currently it seems we are better than the autobots. We are still the best drivers around, and good enough to make driving legal and widespread.

Deaths per mile or whatever summary statistic is just descriptive; I don't see an obvious, natural baseline.

Perhaps we could say something about the question are human-controlled automobiles a safe form of travel relative to other modes of transportation? Or maybe calling humans bad drivers just highlights tbe risks of driving. But assessing the quality of driving of the human population still seems tautological to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com