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Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

Its simple: opportunity cost.

If a testing plan was going to accelerate the adoption of autonomous cars which are twice as safe as human drivers by one month it would save the lives of approximately 40,000/2 / 12 = 1,666.6 people. To stop the aforementioned testing plan because it is expected to kill 1, 10, or even 100 people will increase the expected number of premature deaths.

There is of course an optimum between training deaths vs. future lives saved, accounting for uncertainty, and etc. but the number of expected training deaths will never be zero and considering the large number of future deaths currently expected, the optimum is likely to be much higher than zero.

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How sure are you that the more aggressive development program will lead to faster adoption? If you're talking about a hypothetical program where we are discussing adjusting the acceptable risk level like a slider on an RTS game, then fine, but in practice it might not be like that.

In the real world a more aggressive program might be that way not because someone carefully dialed in the optimum risk, but because of the psychology and attitude of its executives and the same factors might lead to slipshod engineering, ultimately slowing down progress

Additionally, bad press from the resultant fatalities could create a political backlash.

I don't know if this is actually the case, but Waymo comes across as one of the more careful and responsible programs and they seem to have the best engineering and have made the most progress. We don't need 'move fast and break things' in this field. I'd argue we probably don't need it in some other fields as well, but that's a different discussion.

> If a testing plan was going to accelerate the adoption of autonomous cars which are twice as safe as human drivers by one month it would save the lives of approximately 40,000/2 / 12 = 1,666.6 people.

This is being overly generous with the assumption that self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers, to the point of being potentially dangerous.

I say potentially dangerous, because this generosity in your hypothetical is being used to justify deaths that need to happen in order to stop nebulous deaths in the future with technology that might not be as safe as your hypothetical assumes.

Is it really any more potentially dangerous than the inverse - being so risk adverse that we'd refuse to probably sacrifice a few to possibly save the many? All we can do is try optimize our expected value given our current understanding with a reasonable risk aversion.

With cars an improvement to just 90% of the current deaths in the US alone (36k vs 40k) would literally justify running down 10 people a day. The numbers are uncomfortable, sure, but they don't lie and while this is a simplistic analysis I don't see where it is qualitatively incorrect: cars kill so many people even a moderate improvement would be a massive decrease in mortality.

For a comparable situation, see research into emergency medicine. It is impossible to get consent, people likely have/will die as a result of trials, and yet they are (judged to be) in the common good, despite some very reasonable reservations.

You make a very dubious moral argument when you imply that preventing one death can justify another death. That assumption is not at all obvious.

If taken to be true, it can potentially be used to justify any random murder.

Does preventing 10 deaths not justify 1?

Does preventing 1.1 deaths not justify 1?

You misunderstand or are misrepresenting my position: sometimes lives invested are worth it in lives saved.

Edit: fwiw I'm not in the field of automous vehicles.

Unfortunately, we don't know it that it will prevent any deaths. Some people hope that it will, but there's no hard data to show that programs with more deaths progress faster. The outcome could very well be that this strategy prevents 0 deaths and cause 10.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the most dangerous path is the one in which the ends justify the means. If you don't achieve the ends... then you have nothing but tragedy and sorrow.

We accept that argument all the time in practice.

Seat belts kill. They occasionally strangle people.

Yet they save far more than they kill, so we not only use them, but many countries mandate their use by law knowing people will die as a result.

It is morally justified because we're not sacrificing a known subset of people to save another known subset of people that don't overlap - we're sacrificing a small random subset of people to save a larger random subset drawn from the same larger set, and so reducing the chance of harm to all, rather than transferring it.

This distinction is key, and would reject most "random murders" you might propose.

Which is still under the assumption that there's some orders-of-magnitude-safer-AI-driving-paradise. With seatbelts, we know how many people are saved by them vs. killed by them. With AI driving, we are merely guessing.

It doesn't need to be "some orders-of-magnitude-safer-AI-driving-paradise". If it improves on human driving by 10%, it'd still save thousands of lives a year.

This is still very generous, given that we're many orders of magnitude away from even being close to being as safe as human drivers when it comes to autonomous driving.

Coming from a crowd that is probably intimately familiar with the limitations of Google Assistant's ability to understand the English language, I feel like we're being overly optimistic here.

I don't doubt that eventually we will be able to create safe autonomous vehicles, in the same way that eventually we will be able to treat cancers much more effectively than we do today.

However, I find it odd that posters are not applying same level of optimism to other fields, nor applying the same level of skepticism to this field that they would apply to something like cancer research. Especially given that a breakthrough in cancer treatment could effectively save tens of millions of lives annually, versus the one million lives that could be saved if we completely eliminated automotive deaths. Which, again, is a moonshot given that autonomous processes in other industries still have an annual death toll.

You're right, but just as a correction on your numbers, you're vastly underestimating the amount of potential lives saved because of the implicit assumptions that humans only exist in the USA, and that self-driving technology developed in the USA will only benefit Americans when it comes to safety.

There's more than 1 million road fatalities yearly according to the WHO[1]. Once the technology is developed it'll be rapidly exported, just in the EU there's around 25k deaths/yr[2], another 4k in Japan[3] etc.

So even if you only include countries and other areas with a similar GDP as the US (which could purchase self-driving vehicles at a similar rate) you easily get upwards of 100k deaths/yr.

1. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/en/

2. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ED...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

As a non-American I still think that underestimating is the right approach for the simple reason that it pre-empts a "but why should we pay with [whichever country you use] lives" argument from a certain subset. Restricting the estimate to "number of lives saved in the country the testing is done" gives an outcome that is much harder to argue against.

Good answer. Have an upvote.

But, your answer implicitly assumes the total elimination of human drivers and their replacement by autonomous vehicles. This strikes me as unlikely.

it's not unreasonable given the same opportunity cost argument that most people will switch to and prefer autonomous vehicles if they are shown to be inherently safer more predictable drivers. This is a huge risk to long haul truck drivers since those jobs are already long and grueling as it is. Their livelihood is threatened by the fact that robot truck drivers don't sleep. It's not a matter of if it will be replaced but when, since logistics are a huge business and nothing to mess around with.

I have no doubt that truck drivers jobs are under threat.

But you are justifying this assumption with yet more assumptions, not hard data. For example: If they are proven to be inherently safer.

I'm literally just rather tired at the moment and also finding this argument wearying. But actual reality has a really long track record of failing to conform to human predictions of that sort.

When antibiotics were discovered, it was predicted to be the end of human disease. Fast forward to today and the articles we routinely read are about the crisis of antibiotic shortages, antibiotic resistant infections and whatever will do now?

When the first air planes came out, they had square windows. So did the first jets -- until they began falling from the sky as if some Cthulhoid horror had ripped then to pieces in the sky. Then they changed the windows to rounded designs.

Human ability to accurately predict the future is notoriously lousy.

Once autonomous vehicles are safe enough, and the cost differential is small enough, expect to start seeing a push to outlaw human drivers.

After every fatal crash caused by a human driver expect to see a "how long are we going to put up with this?" push.

It's hard to predict how soon it will happen, but I can't imagine society continuing to put up with human drivers for very long.

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