Comment by bluetwo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluetwo | Hacker News Reader

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One of these days, sooner or later, this is what is going to happen:

Some people being toted about by an autonomous car are going to be killed. The NTSB is going to blame the car for making bad decisions. The car maker is going to blame the condition of the road, signs, or painted lines. They are going to pin the blame on the state government.

Insurance companies will point fingers at each other, depending on who they represent.

Then, everyone is going to sue everyone.

The state is going to have to explain WHY it let these cars on roads that were not maintained at a level of being 100% compatible with the level of technology in existence.

The state will say they were told the technology was safe, and pull out fancy presentations that were put together with no intention of ever ending up in court.

Technology companies will shrug and say it was marketing speak and, well, you knew the risks.

Then everyone will start covering their butts, and AI in autonomous cars will stop become a thing for awhile.

I think this is giving the NTSB too little credit. Remember, the people who work at the NTSB deal with statistics all day, and for the most part genuinely care about reducing traffic deaths. So I think that, for their part, it'll look more like the way they've handled investigations into crashes with current partial automation (ie Tesla's autopilot): with a lot of emphasis on the overall effect of the system on accident rates, rather than on one specific crash.

We've already had fatal self driving crashes while the self driving system was in operation. The media irresponsibly, but predictably, tried to use it to drive people into a terrified frenzy - which surprisingly did not work. And even more surprising, the regulators were also reasonable. There was an understanding of what caused the crash and that there are inherent risks. This was contrasted by data indicating that, for instance, since Tesla rolled out their autopilot system - crashes as a whole declined some odd 40%.

And finally there is even just macabre data on fatality rates. On average in the US currently about 1.2 people are expected to die in car crashes per 100 million miles driven. Tesla alone has had hundreds of millions of miles driven in its full autopilot mode, and the fatalities are not racking up like they 'should' be. We could argue that maybe people are paying more attention when the autopilot system is enabled, but practice across the industry has shown the exact opposite to be invariably true.

I think it's just been so long since our society had a revolutionary 'physical' technology, that we've become scared of change and progress. Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse. Or imagine the idea of stringing the entire country up with electric polls with so much energy going between them that anything landing on a wire and touching something else was certain to be killed, and accepting the fact that when these polls, or the lines between them, go down they not only could but on some occasions would start fires, and so forth. Going from human to automatically driven vehicles is a hardly meaningful contrasted against many of the revolutions of technology throughout the times.

And one final point is that we're also being somewhat self centered in this discussion. These technological changes we're seeing are happening worldwide. An image of e.g. Singapore streets with people in vehicles relaxing as they are autonomously driven to their destination would leave the state of the US and its rules and regulations looking increasingly like an anachronism. Certainly something that would cast a dim light on our view of ourselves as the world leader in innovation.

I generally agree with you. It should, however, be noted that you'll need to compare fatality rates caused by human drivers and fatality rates caused by Teslas autopilot under the same driving conditions. I am pretty sure that there is a vast amount of driving conditions under which the autopilot cannot be engaged safely (and will not get engaged). It's one thing driving on a highway and another thing driving in a crowded city. Here in Germany we have comparably little fatalities on highways. Most occur on rural roads and cities.

You have to distinguish between fatal crashes and all crashes. Here [1] are the data for the US if you can tolerate that site. What is the typical condition for a fatal crash? It's extremely counter intuitive. It is driving straight, on a major roadway, in good weather, during the day time, while sober, in a 4 door hardtop sedan. Seriously.

I'm reluctant to go social science and start handwaving too much causality there, but on the other hand I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to observe that those 'easy' driving conditions also tend to be some of the highest speed driving conditions. Creates a nasty combination of of a situation where we might be more subject to lapses of attention, due to comfort, and exponentially increased consequences when that lapse results in a crash.

But the really cool thing here is that these are also the conditions that right now the self driving systems are rocking. In other words there's actually a chance you're right that we're not comparing apples to apples, but instead are actually oversampling conditions where fatal accidents are more likely to happen!

[1] - https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

> We've already had fatal self driving crashes while the self driving system was in operation.

There is no true (level 5) self-driving system yet, only driver-assist where the system may hand back control at any moment. It's only true self-driving when there's no human in the car.

> Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws - knee-jerk legislative response driven by a combination of fear and lobbying is always a risk.

That is rather humorous on the red flag traffic laws. Had never heard of that before!

One thing that's nice now about self driving vehicles is that it seems that more or less the entire automotive industry is hopping on board. For some time it looked like it was going to be Google + Tesla doing self driving and I think it being lobbied and consequently "regulated" out of existence in the US was a very real danger. But at this point, which influential lobbying force might, even if we're just speculating, be a concern?

Thank you PJC for hearing what I was trying to say.

Good example, too.

I'm not a particular optimist about AI, but I think your cynical take doesn't account enough for the potential changes in mindset and policy that could occur by the time an autonomous car can take full blame for a big disaster.

First of all, that incident will likely have been preceded by years of semi-autonmous driving becoming more and more mainstream, which means there will be more incidents similar to the Tesla autopilot fatality a couple years ago. And as we've seen, Tesla was unpunished in the NTSB's report, and self-driving investment continued unabated, so there's reason to believe that future fatalities won't cause major outrage because the public will have found ways to rationalize it.

Five to 10 years of mainstream semi-autonomous driving may be enough to do 2 things:

- Strongly reduce the demand for people to learn how to drive themselves, or want to drive at all (especially among the senior-age population). Keep in mind that trustworthy semi/mostly-autonomous driving will likely make Uber/Lyft even more day-to-day afforadable.

- Strongly increase people's comfort with AI and robotics. Sure, AI already has huge impact and influence on society. But not in the day-to-day tangibility that comes with confidently trusting your daily drive to AI. Society's appreciation (and/or complacency) toward AI will likely be at a much higher level by the time fully-auto cars become mainstream.

So when that AI-instigated-driving-disaster finally happens, you have a status quo that's generally favorable toward AI, including the passage of laws that make road conditions more favorable toward AI, both in reducing operational hazards and in mitigating legal culpability. Finally, you have a society far more dependent on self-driving cars -- you really think the millions of people who are 90 to 100% dependent on AI-personal-transportation are going to give up their livelihoods (nevermind their investments in the actual hardware) because of one big wreck?

I'm too cynical to think that society will become more intellectual and rational about things. But I believe that when fully-auto cars are approved, there will be too much acceptance/complacancy for outrage to cause the industry to roll back.

I agree that there will be lot of butt-covering between all the stakeholders when this fatal accident happens -- but I argue that there will be plenty of butt-covering well before this kind of situation.

An accident will happen yes. There are about 3,287 road deaths per day globally[1] already however so hopefully people will view this in context.

[1] http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...

So?

Exactly what you describe happens all the time in every field.

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