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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>>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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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