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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to say something that I suspect many will quietly agree with but may not be willing to say out loud.

I'm confident that self-driving cars will eventually be safer than human driven ones. I'm not confident that this can be realistically achieved without killing some unfortunate bystanders in the process of getting to that point. That doesn't mean we should accept these cars running amok killing people all over the place. It doesn't mean I think this specific case involving Uber is "reasonable" either. I just think, in a general sense, a realist has to be able to try to find some balance between short term lives lost and long term lives saved.

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The thing is that any other industry that works like this(we have to accept some people will be hurt/die to achieve progress) - like the medical testing industry - is extremely heavily regulated and most crucially, all participants in testing are consenting to being tested. Letting autonomous cars on public roads is testing it on people who have not consented being tested on. If I get hit by an autonomous car I really don't care that thanks to this Uber/Google/Waymo/Whoever gets to improve their algorithm. I don't care how they want to do it - but I don't want them testing this stuff on public roads.

Over 5k people die in pedestrian/motor vehicle crashes every year. None of them are consenting to being killed. To the extent that you might consider "walking near paved roads" consenting, then that distinction doesn't change if there's computer-driven cars on the road.

It is different, because they are testing untested algorithms that have unknown risks and failure modes.

The software and hardware has been extensively tested on test tracks, they built a whole fake road system in Pittsburgh[1].

Even drug companies can't know what they don't know and end up killing people with extensively tested drugs. Airplanes fall out of the sky because of unknown bugs that simply cannot be reasonably tested for.

Human progress relies on taking mitigated risks.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-fake-city-pittsburgh-se...

Random untested people without driver's licenses and people who no longer possess the faculties to drive safely are on the road all the time. You're being hyperbolic.

The difference is obviously that those people break the law, so it's already regulated against.

Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation?

Medical industry is heavily regulated now, but regulations appeared after it has grown in size. Similarly transport, construction, and anything else I could think of.

The reason it happens this way is that it's hard to set up standards and practices for something that is entirely new - when you set them up too soon, they may end up impossible to achieve, and block innovation altogether.

Funnily enough, the automobile industry is one of them. The Locomotives on Highways Act predated the car by decades in the UK, and its regulations were extremely onerous. The relaxation of speed limits from 4mph to 14mph and removing of the need for a human escort on foot helped, but we had functioning automobile manufacturing in the UK before then. The speed limit on UK roads was 20mph or lower until the 1930s, and Britons built a thriving domestic car manufacturing industry and even broke land speed records several times in that period.

(Similarly, and less comically in retrospect, crash testing regimes resulted in a lot of safety improvements that would have been unlikely as a result of purely commercial considerations)

The horse and railway industries lobbied for that act of course.

The 14mph and no red flag escort was only for machines <3 tonnes, in 1896, probably only a few 100 machines on the road then anyway

Many crash testing standards were led by manufacturers. Funny that consumer ratings groups rate the safety of vehicles and so there's commercial interest to meet higher than required standards.

>>Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation?

The issue here is that almost every industry began in times when we collectively didn't give much shit until things went wrong. If you wanted to make a watch factory using radium - sure, go ahead. It was only after people started dying that we figured out that maybe this needs regulation. But if you wanted to make a commercial product in 2018 using radium you would have to go through plenty of hoops, and rightfully so.

I don't see why autonomous cars are any different - I don't see why we're starting with the assumption that it's fine to test this without strict regulation applied to everything else automotive. Like, if you wanted to start a startup making new tyres using a revolutionary compound, it would not be allowed to just go ahead on public roads - they would need to pass extremely strict testing that we apply to tyres since they are a life/death kind of component. But autonomous cars are allowed as-is right now? With a failure mode where the car literally doesn't react at all to a person crossing the road, despite having 4(!) sets of sensors used to detect this exact kind of obstacle? That is an engineering failure of the worst kind. The law tried to make it better by requiring a driver behind the wheel - but that's still clearly not enough.

Plus you would have a selection bias. High regulations induce much larger upfront costs. That would kill most of these nescent industries. So industries that would fall under heavy regulation now just never see the light of the day.

It was actually Peter Thiel's grief against over regulation. It kills creativity in domains that are much more important to mankind than websites.

> Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation?

Is version 1.0 of a product technically considered patched? I'm assuming, categorically, no..

That said, despite where we're talking about it, Uber is not primarily in the tech industry - they don't sell you software, they sell you rides - so they are a taxi business, foremost. The taxi business (artificially chauffeured, or, not,) is actually a perfect example of an industry where regulation makes it palatable at all, compared to what v1 taxi cabs were like...

There is also the issue of whether or not we even have the means to regulate (or even come up with a formalization for the axiomatic ethical examination of near-black-box/difficultly analyzable tech).

That's a separate concern from whether or not the consumer will be liable for mistakes made by the provider until regulation is in place.

imo, innovation is pretty unimportant compared to regulation, and far less valuable, too..

There's a lot of evidence that the current regulation of medicine and medical devices is net negative, i.e. it effectively causes more deaths than were regulation lessened.

The problem is that the general public will not accept deaths caused by machines even if they are statistically safer. As an example, the German government gave in to public pressure after Fukushima and decided to shut down all nuclear power plants even though total death rate of coal power is A LOT higher and this event did not even happen in their own continent.

If stuff like this continues to happen, i can see some government banning self driving tech for the foreseeable future.

It's actually the same with terrorism, school shootings and plane crashes. They are all statistically insignificant compared to other causes of non natural death, starting with common assaults, drownings and road accidents. But they monopolise the headlines and create an irrational fear.

I wonder if there is a Simpson's paradox effect at play here, and that it is rationally sensible to be more afraid of planes than cars.

Even though in absolute terms there are more deaths by automobile, that is also because people are typically around cars more frequently than they are on planes. I.e. any given school shooting or plane ride IS more risky than any given bath or car journey, but the latter occur much more frequently.

Not sure exactly what the numbers are.

Some statistics [1] for travel in the US:

  Cars & trucks 5.75 deaths per billion miles
  Commercial airlines 0.06 deaths per billion miles

So airlines are a couple orders of magnitude safer by miles traveled.

In my own personal case I put about 10,000 miles on my car each year, and I travel about 50,000 - 80,000 miles on an airplane. So airlines are still safer as I don't travel 2 orders of magnitude farther on them.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/news/economy/train-plane-car...

Deaths per mile is a good metric in that it is the same for everybody, so to speak, but this is also a weakness. Some people fly far further than they drive or _would_ drive, so for them we should look at per-journey metrics. This must be calculated individually because we all have different typical journeys, but it produces a more meaningful number. For example, any given day that I drive, I drive around 10 miles. When I fly, I usually fly 2600 miles. Over billion days on which I drive, I die 57.5 times, and over a billion flying days I die 156 times - so for me, I am ~3 times as likely to die in transit on a day I fly as on a day I drive. _That's_ what I think about when I file onto the plane. I'm not comparing my odds of death to the hypothetical equivalent drive, in part because I wouldn't drive that 2600 miles so it's an apples to oranges comparison. I'm comparing my odds of death today to my odds of death yesterday and my odds of death tomorrow!

I really doubt if you dug into the flying statistics that all those miles are created equal. Apparently only 16% of air crashes happen during the cruise portion of a flight[1]. You probably need to consider the chance of crashing on a per-flight rather than per-mile basis (as 84% of accidents happen in the takeoff and landing phases, which are approximately the same length for all flights). A long haul flight (which 2600 miles would be) would therefore appear to be more dangerous than it actually is.

[1]: https://www.statisticbrain.com/airplane-crash-statistics/

The same page gives the odds of dying in a single airplane flight as 1 in 29.4 million. The odds of dying per mile driven are approximately 1 in 174 million. On that basis, your 10 mile journey has a risk of death of approximately 1 in 17.4 million - death is 1.7x more likely.

There's probably a bunch of other ways to interpret the statistics - car miles aren't created equally either, there's a difference between long haul and short haul flight fatality statistics, there's a big difference based on where the airline operates. It's (like all things in life) not very clear cut.

You bring some good information into this, which also gets more to the point I was trying to make, specific math aside - though I am comforted your math shows my flights are probably safer! Given that neither airplane journeys & miles nor automobile journeys & miles are created equally, per-mile statistics aren't particularly meaningful to an individual traveler.

First those 2600 miles are not absolutely safe, so it is a higher risk than an average trip.

And if you qualify the airline deaths based on journey type then you also need to qualify the car trip by journey type. As he is presumably sober, not tired, using a seat belt, not speeding 30+ MPH over speed limit etc his risks of dying over 10 miles is less than half that of the average 10 miles driven.

So, his risk of death per trip is actually higher when flying.

deaths per billion miles is the metric we should use?

We could attempt to attribute it to a statistical phenomenon from a freshman sociology course that is neckbeard-stroking worthy, or maybe editors just figured out that "man hit by train gone wild" will almost always sell more papers than "man knifes other man in street". Plus whatever political bias and what not is involved. Then there's often a positive feedback loop with what society ends up paying attention to.

I absolutely agree that some lives will be lost in the name of progress. I also hate the NIMBY ism showing up in these threads. However, I don't care for Uber or its ambition. I'm more worried that Uber's negligence will set the whole industry back with a public backlash.

I think the most uncomfortable part that people won't bring up is the fact that cars are essentially high speed, high weight metal death machines on wheels.

Just a quick Google search and the first results give me this info:

>Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44.

From this page: http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...

Of course unmanned driving tests will happen at a very, very small fraction of the amount compared with manned drivers we have to pull stats from but I don't think it will take long, if the unmanned tests persist enough to conjure up the required amount of data needed to make a legitimate comparison to prove that unmanned driving will be markedly safer.

>Over 90% of all road fatalities occur in low and middle-income countries, which have less than half of the world's vehicles.

The only person who died in a road fatality in phoenix that day was killed by a self driving car.

And how about in the rest of Arizona and/or the rest of the week?

To be clear, I personally don't espouse these "NIMBY"ist ideas, I'm just pointing out that they exist and that they will be a real problem for widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles.

Uber, with their recklessness, is inflaming them a lot.

It can be realistically achieved, because it already has been achieved. Self-driving cars done right are already safer than humans - see Waymo's record. The woman didn't die today to somehow save people tomorrow. She died to fuel Uber's business ambitions.

Waymo's record is only "safer than humans" because they haven't had a fatality yet and thus get 0/x, anything can be "safer than humans" by that count.

I looked up what numbers I could find, according to the OECD's Road Safety Annual Report 2016, in 2014 the US averaged about one death per 150 million vehicle-kilometers (vkm) (6.7 killed per billion vkm).

According to Waymo's own page on the subject, they have driven "more than 5 million miles" (8mvkm) since 2009[0] and they seem to be by far the lead vkm producer in the autonomous space[1]. Just to be as safe as 2014 US human driving they need to clock in an other 140mvkm with no more than one fatality, and even then that could be debated to be in more selected conditions than human driving.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in autonomous driving and I think it would be a great, great thing, but saying it is already safer than human driving is at best misleading.

[0] https://waymo.com/ontheroad/

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s...

Yep, it's like the study done by US government on the chances of accidental detonation of any of their nuclear weapons - and basically the study concluded that the chances are zero, because it hasn't happened yet(the study also found that the cold-war era weapons had no locks, no redundant fail safe mechanisms, and could be detonated by literally anyone who got their hands on one - but hey, none of them were so they must be safe!)

Well, an obvious question to ask is if you are honestly prepared that it is your or your relatives' lives, that are lost in the name of progress / long term gain?

Perhaps, it is easier to speak of things like "short term life lost vs long term life's saved", as long as it is other people losing lives.

To rephrase the question - are you prepared to slightly increase chances of injury of your family for the next 5-10 years, if leads to drastically increasing their safety after 5-10 years, and forever after?

You have to be quite shortsighted to say "no".

This is not rephrasing, this is changing the question to something completely different and wrong.

In addition, not providing any data there or alternative is just misleading.

Ex: I would NOT accept increasing the risk by 10 in the next 5 years to reduce it by 30% afterwards. I would NOT accept increasing the risk by 2 during 5 years if we could instead just increase it by 5% during 10 years and get the same result. I would NOT accept even having the same probability if we could first learn more and take 2 more years and a few billions to get a more stable technology before launch.

The point is, the "what if it is your family" appeal goes both ways. The downside of a laissez-faire policy towards self-driving cars could fall on anyone, but so does the upside.

That’s basically inviting the reader to discard their rationality and answer emotionally.

Clearly it cannot be achieved without killing someone since it has already happened now :-(

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