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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

It's not about "play with some toys". It's about saving lives. Tens of thousands of people are killed by cars every year in the US alone. And the primary causes of those fatalities are the kinds of things most easily addressed by automation - lane drift. Running red lights and stop signs. Speeding. Driving too fast for conditions. Aggressive maneuvering leading to loss of control.

Drunken or distracted driving, by itself, doesn't kill. It leads to the behaviors that kill, like lane drift and speeding and running lights. These are all things that autonomous cars handle really well.

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> And the primary causes of those fatalities are the kinds of things most easily addressed by automation - lane drift. Running red lights and stop signs. Speeding. Driving too fast for conditions. Aggressive maneuvering leading to loss of control.

That's the thing. Fair enough, autonomous cars cannot be drunk or sleepy, but they have _others_ issues that "are most easily addressed by human driving". A human might be distracted, but it won't see a bicyclist for 10 seconds while thinking "I shouldn't do anything in case it's a false positive". Human driver won't directly swerve in a concrete wall because it followed to wrong white line. Human driver will predict better the trajectory of other humans, especially infants.

All in all, I do agree that automation can bring improvements to road safety, but in the current situation, it is not clear at all if this can counteract the automation downsides. It will surely improve, but hastiness might not be the way to go here...

In the Uber case, the system that would have automatically braked upon seeing the bicyclist was disabled. According to their data, it would have stopped on its own, had it been engage. Additionally, there was no system to automatically alert the driver of the hazard the car had been ordered to ignore. And the driver wasn't paying attention.

So it's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. the fatality was a consequence of multiple human errors, both consciously and neglectfully. The automation was not in error.

Of course the automation was in error: it was so much in error they have to disable it!

All the arguments about the driver that should have been alerted or reacted are simply not autonomous driving so unrelated.

Again, I'm not saying that automation will never be a good replacement for human drivers, but as of right now, it is not clear at all if its positive aspects counterbalance its shortcomings.

Right. So the question is, at what point do we start turning auto-autos (I should use that word) loose on the road for live testing? Do we have to wait until they are demonstrably better than human drivers? How do we prove that?

After reading the Atlantic's Waymo article, I'm more convinced that Uber is doomed in this race. They're not investing properly in simulation, and Waymo is getting an enormous amount of programming done based on controlled simulations that Uber isn't - billions of miles, and repeatable scenarios.

Tesla is really in the game, I think, because they're able to collect so much data from the AutoPilot systems currently on the road, even if they're not in use. They still get all the telemetry for complex real-world situations.

But at some point, you have to let experimental software out on the road, to learn from the real world. Simulation is insufficient. Or, we simply refuse to allow auto-autos at all, permanently establishing that humans will always be more capable, without evidence. So it's a question of when, not if.

There's a couple of currents going in the arguments here. Some say "not yet", and some say "never". I think the "never" people are nuts. Auto-autos that broadly outperform human drivers safety-wise seems achievable to me in the not-too-distant future.

When a human-driven car kills someone, the driver is held responsible and faces some sort of punishment. When a self-driving car kills someone, it's not clear that there are consequences, meaningful or otherwise, for anyone besides the person killed. Until this changes, I am fine with having a hardline stance against autonomous vehicles on the same road I'm on.

Volvo has the right approach. If the fault is on their car when it is in autonomous mode they will take full responsibility. They have said so multiple times publicly. Then again they don’t trust their system enough to give it to actual customers yet.

My experience with Volvo was very positive. They were very keen on building a Simulink model for the entire vehicle, which IMHO is a good way to go.

> the driver is held responsible

Yes, if they are drunk or clearly driving recklessly. Otherwise, it's an accident. Their insurance will pay, and they will go on probably with some emotional scars but nothing really in the way of "punishment"

Until you show statistics that prove self-driving cars can save lives, you're just emoting. In the meantime, we have several proven solutions to save lives, like public transportation, or encouraging bicycling (as the Netherlands did in response to their accident crisis).

Right, and machines could prevent other forms of murder, or help the elderly, or reduce fatal injuries in construction by using robots, etc, etc. It would be cool to get to that stage. Potential != Reality. The reality is that we're far far away from autonomous vehicles operating safely on roads as they are currently designed.

If you want to simply reduce vehicle related deaths, you could address this through various ways like improving road safety/visibility, adding more driver assistance aids. Or heck, design a protocol to disallow cars from starting with a drunk driver or without a seat-belt, etc etc. Maybe people who get into even minor accidents need extra training, etc. etc. There's so many low hanging fruit here..

Yeah or simply raise licensing requirements. They are ridiculously lax in the US at least.

Or rebuilding America's crippled mass transit infrastructure. Billions are going in subsidies to self-driving tech. We could at least get the largest cities back into mass transit, train, express bus form with late night operations. You allow the blue collar worker to get home safely after drinking for a minimal amount of money and you'll see an improvement in road safety as well as economic growth.

I am very much with you on this but I was saddened to read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... - it describes active attempts to throttle adoption of mass transit.

I don't get it - that's so short sighted. It really saddens me. Especially in cities like Nashville, who are not very large or dense, but have the opportunity to grow by a lot in the coming decades. At least having an approved and implemented project in plans would be immensely beneficial to that community.

Disclaimer, I have never been to Nashville, but I've heard about it from people who have been there and did a bit of reading 5 minutes ago.

It would take far more than billions to expand mass transit meaningfully. Billions would get you maybe one new subway line in one city.

You'd get more than you think. Seattle's $58 billion ST3 project gets a train from Seattle to Redmond, Edmonds, a west loop and a street car expansion:

http://soundtransit3.org/calculator

It's a sizable chunk of transit. It's all about the priorities of a city.

... but can't handle not running into stationary objects. Or cyclists, in the previous high profile fatality.

My neighborhood is practically littered with white bicycles, chained like ghosts at the sites where bicyclists were killed by cars. So clearly, human drivers aren't perfect at avoiding cyclists either.

Singling out the "previous high profile fatality" is magical thinking. Drawing statistical "evidence" from it is pseudoscience. Meanwhile, a quick googling shows over 800 cyclists killed per year by cars, and nearly 50,000 injured, in the US alone.

Yes, and how many more miles are driven by human drivers in the US compared to autonomous vehicles?

Obviously there is going to be a disparity in the number of deaths. What is important is the number of deaths per mile.

Further complicating matters is the fact that most of the miles being driven by these autonomous vehicles are being done with human operators trained to be alert and the unique quirks of an autonomous vehicle. They will likely be much prepared to stop an accident from occurring when the car makes a mistake than an average consumer.

Autonomous driving may in fact be revolutionary and reduce the number of traffic deaths dramatically, but it is still early enough in development that there isn't any evidence to bank on anything at this point. There certainly isn't enough to rush the tech out the door either on the public either.

You’re begging the question. Given performance to date, real world deployment is no way certain to be as safe - much less safer - than human drivers at the current state of the tech.

I don’t doubt it will get there and, when it does, these profit-oriented corner-cutting behemoths had better have a shit ton of data to prove it. when they’ve proven the premise you’re taking for granted.

Then I’ll happily see this tech widely deployed.

The first automated driving solutions are, and will continue to be, used in situations where humans are at their best - the easiest driving conditions. So it's misguided to compare their performance to humans in non-perfect conditions. If an AI driver is driving in other than perfect conditions, and there is a crash, apologists can and will say "well, the idiot human should have switched off the AI". The AI is inherently considered better because of mental gymnastics that deny responsibility. This is an example of how humans are exploiting defects in other humans' reasoning, not how AI is superior.

If it’s about saving lives like you say, your go-to solution should be public transportation. It’s already proven effective. There are already automomous trains in operation world-wide.

I'm not at all opposed to public transportation, or bicycles.

First, can we please call them "auto-autos"?

Second, yes, they can't come soon enough because traffic is a meat grinder: it's human sacrifice to the gods of speed and convenience.

However, you do not test dangerous industrial equipment in the street with kids and dogs and bikes crossing the freeway, etc...

You just don't do that. It's insane.

A big robot with a couch on it should never travel faster than it can reliably stop quickly enough to prevent any conceivable collision. That's the hard limit. Until we can do that, any machine heavy enough and traveling fast enough to kill is a killbot.

First Law of Robotics?

I like the auto-auto term. Trying to use it now.

But that said, aren't you holding automation to a different standard than humans? Is it okay to have the big robot with a couch travel quicker than it can stop to prevent any conceivable collision, just because a human is in charge of the brakes? Because that's what cars do now! I can conceive of situations where it's not possible to hit the brakes on time in an ordinary car - hell, I once hit a bicyclist when I was only going about 15mph, because she basically appeared out of nowhere before I (or she) could stop.

> I like the auto-auto term. Trying to use it now.

Cheers!

> But that said, aren't you holding automation to a different standard than humans?

Yes and no.

Humans drive preternaturally well en mass. So much so that when I realized it I began to suspect that "Guardian Angels" might be real. Then I learned more about human unconscious motor neurology. Driving performance is one of the few places where the unconscious mind is blatant. Nevertheless we have set up a system that amounts to a "mayhem lottery". When I say "they can't come soon enough" I really mean it.

Now eventually auto-autos will be super-human in capabilities and performance. They don't have blind-spots, they can use radar and lidar and mass sensors, etc. They will also have the benefit of perfect hindsight across the whole fleet (if we set it up sensibly!) Further, traffic infrastructure will evolve to facilitate automated traffic, with sensors and comms embedded in signals and even the road. They'll be able to share knowledge in real-time of local road conditions and keep track of people and (non-self-driving) vehicles around them cooperatively. Sooner or later, it won't be possible for someone to surprise one of these things.

And all this will happen at an ever-accelerating rate. (Which means that if you just wait, making them gets exponentially easier!)

In the meantime, it's not okay to use public space to test crude early prototypes. People have already died.

I was truly shaken and upset when I read that the Uber car that killed that woman crossing the road with her bike had determined 1.3 seconds before it struck and killed her that it needed to initiate emergency braking, yet the emergency braking system had been disabled because it didn't work well enough. The machine knew it had to stop, it had the capability to stop, but it was prevented from stopping by bad decision-making driven by the desire to put unsafe machinery on public roads.

That's tragic and truly pathetic, and I would say the makers committed murder. Certainly, if you or I built a robot and sent it out into the world and it killed a person we would have to defend our actions with something better than, "Well it's not perfect. Give it some time."

We could make a e.g. self-driving golf cart that could safely take my mother to her doctor's appointments and back. She's got dementia so we don't want her to take the bus even though she's physically able. It would have a top speed of 3~5 mph, and obviously it would have to travel restricted routes where it wouldn't interfere with traffic, and a there are a host of other concerns. But it would work, we could build it today, there's a market for it, and it would have a really hard time killing anyone in a collision. It would be lightweight as well as slow-moving and covered in airbags inside and out with pre-impact detection and triggering.

Once you start to think outside the box (sorry) there's all kinds of scope for incrementally automating traffic.

Trying to go straight to imitating full-on automobiles with human drivers on public roads is insane, it's hubris. And again, people have already died. So this is not a theoretical concern. There's been a funeral man.

> Is it okay to have the big robot with a couch travel quicker than it can stop to prevent any conceivable collision, just because a human is in charge of the brakes? Because that's what cars do now!

It's not okay for robots to kill people just because people do, no.

(I think a sane transportation network would have at least four interlocking but separate systems: pedestrian, bike, car/truck, & rail. Cf. "Pattern Language" C. Alexander. But I'm getting off on a tangent.)

> I can conceive of situations where it's not possible to hit the brakes on time in an ordinary car - hell, I once hit a bicyclist when I was only going about 15mph, because she basically appeared out of nowhere before I (or she) could stop.

That sucks! Sorry dude.

But yeah, what I'm saying is a robot moving in public should have a hard limit on its kinetic energy (half mass times velocity squared, I just looked it up.)

A robot moving in public with enough energy to injure, maim, or kill is an extraordinary hazard at our current state of development.

If you want to make a safe one, you can keep it lightweight, or you can slow it down.

Your "think of the children" argument is pretty weak, really. Humans are pretty good drivers, and if we had more strict licensing requirements/testing and actual severe penalties for DUI we'd probably cut the death rate by 3/4 and not have to use random people for guinea pigs.

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