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Comment by another-one-off | Hacker News Reader

This is a very rehashed point; but just because these cars crash into things in stupid situations doesn't mean that they are less safe than what we already have. Shouldn't you already be giving semi-autonomous, fully-autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles wide berth?

I assume you mean rides [a motorcycle], which is ~35x more dangerous than driving a car according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing driving a car is already the most dangerous thing people do in a day. They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios. Even if AutoPilot/SuperCruise vehicles are 10 times safer than regular drivers they are still going to take out the occasional motorcyclist.

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With human-driven vehicles there is often a chance to make eye contact to confirm that you see each other. Perhaps the robot cars need some equivalent. Interesting interface design problem.

> Interesting interface design problem.

And so Don Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things book fame) is at it from UCSD: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/

Eye contact doesn't insure the safety of either party.

That's not true. Human brain has evolved to pick up subtle things that even our conscious brains don't recognize. An eye-contact is a reaffirmation that the driver has seen me (and vice-versa) and notices my intent. Of course, people can misread. But in my experience riding a bicycle or crossing a sidewalk a simple eye-contact and a head nod goes a long way in resolving a conflict on who goes first or if it's ok to cross.

In the Illinois Motorcycle handbook it definitely states that just because you and another driver make eye contact, that doesn't mean they actually see you. Either way, as a motorcyclist, I'm not gonna count on eye contact to make sure of my safety. I ride and drive defensively at all times. I assume the worst in most situations.

> I assume the worst in most situations.

If that was really true you would never ride a motorcycle.

Eyeballing the other guy is no guarantee of anything, but it provides quite a lot of information about the risk you face in the interaction. I think we would miss it when dealing with fully autonomous vehicles, and that the vehicles might add something to tell you they see you. I've done some work on this idea in the lab with mobile robots.

> If that was really true you would never ride a motorcycle.

This is such a garbage statement. We check our parachutes twice before jumping, and whilst not jumping is inherently safer - having decided to jump you can still protect yourself from risks inherent in the activity.

If you assume the worst, there'd be no point checking the parachute. You assume it will fail.

Since this is not how people really behave, we are very rarely actually assuming the worst.

Of course it doesn't. But it's better than nothing. We do it all the time.

Motorcycles are dangerous because of other motorists. Most are actually intending to do you harm e.g the California study on lane splitting. Only advantage you've as a rider, is speed and nimbleness. My rule, when I'm riding I automatically assume no one sees me. I act accordingly. Try make sure, I'm the not sandwiched by cards.

Motorcycles are still dangerous without other motorists. My car will protect me from a lot of mistakes that would be fatal on my bike.

I've been passed by bikes doing slalom at ~300 kph. It's not common, for sure, but it's memorable. So my rule about bikes is that they're unpredictable.

25% of motorcycle accidents don't involve cars, just riders screwing up.

> They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios.

If we worried about safety, there would be much, much less drivers on the road.

See, society have decided that practically every adult is perfectly capable of controlling a several thousand pound piece of metal while practical evidence points to somewhere else: some or even most people drive so badly they shouldn't be doing so.

We build a world where the motorist rules and we are paying for this with a huge amount of dead and disabled people. Is it truly worth it? Could we live another way (sure, once we did, but we want to do better now)? Transit and such is mostly sold on the merits of climate change these days and noone dares to say this: you should be on transit because you can't drive.

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