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Comment by disiplus | Hacker News Reader

i would not take those chances. if the self driving car is only slightly better then average driver in fatal accidents that's not good enough. most of accidents happen because of distractions (texting and so on) and if a self driving car is only slightly better then average driver I can get a lot better if I just don't use my smartphone while driving and don't sit behind a wheel tired.

so it's not enough to be better then average driver. It needs to be as good as "good" driver or better before I would trust it.

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I wouldn't trust my life to proprietary software, because its makers' motives obviously don't align with my own. If my safety was really paramount, they'd open their software to scrutiny.

It's unethical to leave life-and-death decisions to a black-box algorithm, when I know it was written for the primary purpose of gathering more money. Safety is a constraint, not their goal.

You already do that right now and basically have done it every day of your life.

The power grid, railway, traffic lights, elevators, etc. all these systems are critical and closed source, and you don't see them killing people on a wide scale nor even on a small scale but regular basis.

Yep. Add the code which controls ABS and ESP in modern cars.

Elevators I'll grant you, but the power grid, railway and traffic lights are all controlled by governments, councils and NGO-type organisations — they all have reliability as their primary concern, not churning out units for profit.

And it may be irrational, but wrongly-activating brakes feel like less of a risk than wrongly-activating steering or accelerators.

And anyway, “lots of things are untrustworthy” is not a good argument for trusting something else.

You’re implying that agency is the element that is most desired. Ie if a human crashes and kills themselves/others, it is ok, because someone is at fault.

If the car is anywhere from slightly to quite a lot safer, but accidents that result in injuries/deaths occur, then it is not ok.

Psychologically you may feel this to be ‘right’ but I would prefer a world with less injuries and deaths all round. And one day the courts will too

no I'm just saying that average is not good enough.

imagine lung cancer for example, if we take average then it's 6% risk taking smookers and not smookes, but if I decided not to smoke then it's 0.2%. so in this case I can do better for lowering the chances then when I would accept some other solution that would let us all have it at 5% witch might seem ok but not for me.

wich

You are setting up a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose between Autopilot and paying attention. The video above is an obvious example. It didn't result in an accident because the driver was paying attention and intervened.
Also you aren't considering that other drivers can be the cause of a potential accident. You can assume that the other drivers on the road are average drivers with all the distractions that come along with that. If you make the other drivers on average slightly safer, that improves your safety even if your behavior is completely unchanged.

> You are setting up a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose between Autopilot and paying attention. The video above is an obvious example. It didn't result in an accident because the driver was paying attention and intervened.
If you have to pay attention, then you might as well be driving.

This is just a silly argument to me. Would anyone suggest that cruise control is worthless because you still have to steer the car?

The more the car drives for you, the harder it is to pay attention and the slower the context switch when suddenly the situation demands it.
This is basic human nature.

Cruise control is useful to me because it means I won’t accidentally speed. But having to hold the wheel means I need to pay attention. If the car is driving itself human nature means you might not pay attention. Also if the car does something weird you have to decide in a split second if it is because of a hazard you haven’t seen but the car has, or because the software went wrong.

You do have to hold the wheel, precisely because you might find yourself having to assess what the car is doing "in a split second", and possibly issue corrective actions. You can't do that unless you are holding the wheel and are paying attention to what the car is doing! But all that means is that the car is not really driving itself; it is however dealing with the boring, predictable parts of the job and leaving the rest up to you - this makes it easier to be attentive, not harder. The tasks where it's hard to pay continued attention are ones where you have to do something that seems extremely predictable, but also has very rare events where it isn't. Computer assistance can actually help a lot with such cases.

That makes no sense. If I can’t pay attention to the boring predictable part of driving how am I going to pay attention when I’m not even the one driving?
As for the rare unpredictable stuff, I might not be able to predict, say, a ladder falling off a work truck, but I can recognize it could fall off, prepare for that type of event, probably even recognize it before the car does, and if I don’t die, I can learn from it.
I don’t really see how also having to worry about the car itself creating a rare event helps. Now I’ve got to spend additional time deciding whether to take over and if I do, the time I have to react is reduced.

The boring predictable parts of driving (lane keeping and speed keeping) are already basically unconscious muscle memory. It’s watching others for surprises that takes the mental energy.

Exactly - though speed keeping is nice for long road-trips simply not to get foot cramps.
Anyway, I'm yet to see a video of Tesla doing emergency breaks because of highway pileup where it's not only a couple of seconds after human driver could see a row of red breaking lights in front.

Well if marketing says you get a CNC mill and what you really get is three power feeds it's not worthless but it's still not what you were promised.

You definitely aren't doing your commute in a Tesla, then.

Not only that, this is a new type of driving where you have to actively pay attention and fight the vehicle.

i was talking about self driving cars, not really Tesla autopilot. but do you really think this (paying attention and correcting autopilot mistakes) would not be a bigger problem knowing well that no.1 reason of accidents is not paying attention.
yea, other drivers are also part of this, but even then I would like something alot better then average. sure there is a chance a distracted teenager is riding somewhere around you, but it's not better if there is now 10 slightly less distracted teenagers around you.
average is really not a great measure here if we are talking about self driving cars.

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