Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this makes me wish for self driving cars the most. I am fine with killing myself with my driving but it would be very hard to deal with killing another person. I think most of us pretty much every day sometimes don't pay attention and could potentially cause an accident. It's just pure luck getting away with these mistakes.

> I am fine with killing myself with my driving but it would be very hard to deal with killing another person.

This makes me wonder (without judgement) how the engineers at Tesla and Uber are mentally handling the recent events.

You have that problem in every industry where your products can kill people. If you produce cars, medical devices, Space Shuttles or drugs there is a good chance that a mistake will kill people. There is no way around it and people have to deal with it. You only hope that you can be confident that you have done your best with the knowledge you had at the time.

I know how I would handle it -

We are doing work that will save lives. It will be a long, difficult road, and we will make mistakes; But when we finish this work we will be responsible for saving lives every year. This is the right thing to do, even if getting there means the loss of innocent people.

You just have to make sure that you can prove you weren't reckless doing so and did your best to minimize risk.

In almost all realms of human progress, lives have been lost along the way. People died when ships sank, so we made ships safer. People died when rockets malfunctioned, so we made those safer too, and when bridges collapsed, when trains crashed... just about everywhere we have brought in technology to improve our lives. It can't be denied that we are remarkably complacent and usually need people to die to prompt these actions, but in almost every example, those deaths aren't in vain. Something is learned from it. Those who do, make the future safer. It doesn't explain away people dying, but maybe some can be comforted that at least they did not die for nothing.

It makes me wonder how folks that work on weapon systems that are used to kill innocents in poor countries like yemen feel..probably much worse than Tesla engineers?

Plenty of them sleep like babies.

Why would you chose to work on a weapon system if you are unable to handle the fact that weapons are used to kill people? It's literally the job description.

That is the difference between them and Tesla engineers - people killing is a bug in self-driving cars, not a feature.

That's true.

> probably much worse than Tesla engineers?

I doubt it. Such people take the job knowing that the products of their endeavours will be used as weapons. Those who dislike this will either not apply for the job or will leave it relatively soon. On the other hand engineers going into the car business go into it with the knowledge that their products kill and injure fewer and fewer people per kilometre travelled every year so each actual death looms larger.

yeah i guess they have a pessimistic view of security or just do not care if the weapons kill innocents. ?

I'm going to guess it's the potential the technology has. In the US in 2016 almost 40,000 people died in car accidents and millions were injured [1]. Also the average commute round trip in the US is almost an hour [2].

Self-driving cars have the potential to eliminate a great deal of human suffering AND unlock a ton of productive time that has been held up in commuting (back of the napkin calculations suggest tens of millions of hours). If we consider what could be done with all of that lost human potential, the value of self-driving cars is staggering.

Disclaimer: That doesn't mean that self-driving cars shouldn't be made and developed in safe and properly regulated ways. But the promise of the technology likely makes the engineers working on them feel a bit better.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[2] - https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html#5.00/42...

As a petrolhead and passionate driver, it makes me cringe whenever people push for self-driving cars, because I know that enough voices lobbying would wind up making it illegal to have a mass of meat behind the wheel.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, and it's not directed at anyone in particular. I know human drivers make mistakes. We have limits. We miss cues, underestimate distances, are regularly overconfident in our abilities, and innocent people like Mike Rawson die because of it. And yes, it is a supreme tragedy when a life is ended in an entirely preventable way.

The author's pain is very evident, almost wanting to be held to blame for the accident. Because it has been deemed an accident - he was not at fault, there were no circumstances that lay the blame entirely at his feet. It was a simple, freak accident, with a completely non-simple fatal outcome. I guess I am lucky (and I know it is luck, nothing more) that I do not have family or friends I have lost in a car crash.

But like the author, I love to drive. I love to be in control of a fast-moving machine, but only because I trust myself to drive without significant risk to myself, my passengers or pedestrians. I enjoy the challenge of reading the road ahead in search of hazards, I am always careful to use appropriate speed where there may be people on foot. It will be my greatest achievement if my entire time behind the wheel, I never come close to harming anyone else.

I won't go into huge detail about the Uber accident - yes, the technology failed just like the human in this situation, and the conclusion is yet to be reached, but I am willing to accept that autonomous vehicles will achieve their goals of being safer than a human driver. As I mentioned earlier, humans are very fallible. We build machines to compensate for our weaknesses. We built the car to compensate for our lack of speed and stamina. We built computers to compensate for our lack of logical reasoning and swift decision-making. It's only logical the two would go together, but as the accident proved, technology isn't perfect, because it's built by imperfect hands. I have no doubt autonomous cars will be safer than humans, but I think they will never reach a 100% perfect record. They're built by humans, and to be human is to make mistakes. Frequently avoidably, regularly through ignorance, seldom through malice, but nonetheless mistakes are made.

I just hope that as the technology spreads wider it doesn't force those of us who drive for the pleasure of it off the road. Car crashes are a huge statistical cause of unnecessary death, that cannot be denied, but let's not forget - there's a lot of humans on this planet, and there's a lot of different (and often quite creative) ways of mistakenly causing avoidable deaths. Because wherever humans are involved, accidents will inevitably follow.

And sometimes, just like this, there's really no-one to blame except homo sapiens.

I'd feel even worse knowing that I let a bunch of beta grade software under my control and direction kill someone.

You'd be more responsible, not less, you didn't even try to avoid the accident.

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