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Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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