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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to point out that what he says here about autonomous vehicles and the limits of their sensors applies to humans too. It is just socially acceptable to drive in averse conditions with limited visibility, and if you hit another car, person or something else, you just blame it on the weather. It's not socially acceptable for an autonomous vehicle to just wing it in bad conditions.

I find it curious that we are going to hold autonomous vehicles to a perhaps impossibly high standard while we also hold people to barely any standards at all.

Think about this: If you are in an advanced autonomous vehicle and you get a warning that conditions are so bad that the sensors can no longer see well enough to drive and that you should take over, should you really take over or should you stop driving?

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One of the biggest advantages humans have is that humans can take risks. We have agency. Computers cannot take risks; not because they cannot be programmed to take risks, but because they are programmed by huge corporations with massive, centralized liability.

This is why level five autonomous cars will never exist. It's not a technical problem; it's a political one.

Its easy for someone on hackernews to say "maybe you shouldn't be driving if the car can't"; try saying that to a single mother working as a third-shift nurse, just trying to make ends meet, who's patients will suffer if she doesn't get to work. Try saying that to a technician who needs to get to a downed electric line in the middle of a torrential downpour to restore power to 20,000 people sitting comfortably in their homes. Try saying that to a Marine deployed in Nangarhar, under fire from enemy combatants.

Level Five autonomy could exist, but what we'd end up discovering is that humans let Jesus take the wheel far more often than the engineers in sunny Silicon Valley think. Level Five might mean seeing five feet in front of you and horrible traction, operating on your knowledge of the road, and just driving forward. Until an organization is willing to program a car to still drive forward in those conditions, level five won't happen. Uber practically shut down their entire program after one person died; over 100 people die every day in traditional vehicle accidents.

> over 100 people die every day in traditional vehicle accidents.

Which isn't acceptable either. To some degree, people look towards autonomous vehicles as a way of reducing the number of fatalities/injuries on the road. If they're not better than humans & the other benefits don't add up, they won't be accepted.

>Which isn't acceptable either.

Based purely on the evidence at hand, our society deems it not only acceptable but not even noteworthy.

> over 100 people die every day in traditional vehicle accidents.

The real figure is around 3.2k [1]

[1]https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

This comment is way better than the article it comments.

> I find it curious that we are going to hold autonomous vehicles to a perhaps impossibly high standard while we also hold people to barely any standards at all.

This is all US-centric obviously, but my 2c: We can blame individuals for bad behavior, it's harder for us to reason about complex systems breaking and that scares us.

When an accident happens currently, we immediately rush to judgement: You're a bad driver, you were going too fast, there's order in the universe and you made a conscious choice to disrupt that. We'll really reach sometimes too (I've heard this in real life): You had a stroke and lost control of your car? The crash is still your fault, you should've lived a healthier lifestyle. Or it's your spouse's fault, they should've noticed you were acting funny and not let you drive the car.

When people screw up, it's almost always someone's fault even if we have to really reach for it. We rarely consider the system that led to the failure and absolve the individual. When computers screw up, it's unclear who to blame and it's much scarier as a result, so we hold computers to a much higher standard.

This may be true socially, at least in some situations, but not legally or morally; most car wrecks, except those with obvious negligence or worse, are "accidents."

> This may be true socially, at least in some situations, but not legally or morally

Is that true? I just did some very cursory research, but: https://blog.lawinfo.com/2017/09/06/human-error-causes-94-pe...

> It is just socially acceptable to drive in averse conditions with limited visibility, and if you hit another car, person or something else, you just blame it on the weather.

Where do you live where this is socially acceptable (the blame the weather part, not the drive in adverse conditions part)?

Denver for instance goes on accident alert during snow because there are so many minor, non-injury accidents. This means that police will not respond to your accident because there are so many and you self-report. There is obviously an error in the part of drivers given the conditions, but most of these would not have happened on dry pavement.

People on the internet love to say you shouldn't drive in inclement conditions, but this ignores reality. Not everyone is lucky enough to work from home. It has snowed 3 times in the last week in Denver. My wife works in healthcare. She has to show up for work unless it is a blizzard.

What are you going to if it is snowing hard with limited visibility when it's time to leave work? Sleep under your desk or deal with a miserable commute that takes 2-3x as long to get home?

A self driving car won't have a steering wheel, break and accelerator. Because it really doesn't make sense to expect user take control instantly while the algorithm panics.

Basically when people say the term self-driving car, they mean a human brain like entity driving the car. Humans don't exactly panic and expect a person sitting next to them control a car in case they can't handle it. Sure in those situation a human would get into accidents too. But in case of a machine, such an accident is already programmed to happen. Its like fixed. Which is a very different thing. In fact its even wrong to call it an accident if you know a panic will happen. Its more like programmed manslaughter.

If the car still has times that a human needs to take over, they'll continue to have controls for humans.

I've been driving in intense blizzards and ice and steep bad roads of Colorado for 20 years now. Still never had an accident or even gone off the road. That's the standard. Anything less and I'm completely uninterested, because it's just bad tech.

When your engineers say the problem is "too hard to solve" you need to hire better engineers, because those engineers are lying to you. Just because everyone is racing towards a technology and some teams are doing it poorly doesn't mean the problems are insurmountable.

Don't you think part of that experience is luck? What can you do if you are stopped at a red light on an icy road, someone comes in hot and rear ends you, causing you to collide with the vehicle in front of you? You will be at fault for the vehicle you hit. Such accidents are common when it's icy. I have never been in one personally, but lots of friends and co-workers have.

Yeah, that exact scenario has happened to me twice. I like to glance at the rearview if I'm the last car in line to avoid some drunk ramming me, and it definitely saved my life once.

Once I just saw someone coming in a little too hot and was able to pull forward a bit to make room as they were standing on the brakes. Not a big deal.

The lifesaving situation was different though, I was the only car in the right lane and one of those massive F250 trucks was barreling up behind me, not appearing to slow down at all. I was kind of boxed in because the cross street had heavy, fast traffic, and I couldn't pull forward or to the left since there was another car stopped next to me there. So I just quickly scanned the sidewalk to my right to make sure there were no pedestrians, and hopped up the curb to drive on the sidewalk/grass. I wasn't sure if this would work in my tiny car with small wheels, but I figured it would be better than dying.

Worked great. The truck blew through the light and T-boned a Tesla. The guy had 37 empty Coors Light cans scattered around the floor of his truck.

Have any of the self driving car companies even gotten started on the "when should I drive on the sidewalk" subroutine? No, of course not, they are still mired in the bad, early days of the tech where they can't deal with a missing double yellow. It's laughable, the engineers can do much better instead of just repeatedly lowering the bar.

We already have extremely effective and safe mostly autonomous vehicles. They're called "railcars." Conditions in which they break down are well known and obvious.

The goofy robot things Waymo is larping at building do not have obvious or well known break down conditions.

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