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Comment by jussij | Hacker News Reader

Except humans are also steering those 4000 pound blocks of metal around and not doing such a great job of it.

Here in Australia, with a population of 25 Million there where 1,140 road deaths in 2018.

The USA with it's 327 million population had some 40,000 road deaths on 2018.

I find it hard to imagine the av will end up doing any worse a job driving than the humans currently on the road.

And since, even with the occasional bug, the av would be doing a better job of it, that means they will end up saving lives (and lots of them).

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Do we really want to turn this into a numbers game? The difference between those two scenarios is that different people will die. It also assumes we all adopt AVs too. Now of course everybody has equal value, but are you prepared to accept that a software bug and a lapse in human judgement are also equal? Without accepting that at a societal level the average person will not accept AVs.

Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again, or be punished if alcohol was involved. With an AV, currently nobody knows. It could be as simple as "we've checked in the bugfix to prevent this from happening again" with no emotion behind it.

Hasn't the rise of Uber and Lyft already turned it into a numbers game? I get drivers that I would consider below average all the time, and I don't have any control over which driver I get. Even when you're the one driving, you have no control over whether the car in front of you is being driven by a good driver or somebody texting who might cause an accident that endangers you. I agree that it needs to be accepted on a societal level, but if you can definitively say "self driving cars are safer than the average Uber driver," then I don't think it will be that hard of a sell. That's especially true if it results in less expensive rides in addition to lower crash rates.

This. For the majority of fatalities, the driver that caused the accident is rarely among the dead. They are generally in another vehicle. Everything is random. Decreasing the odds of failure will kill individuals, but even a software edge case can cause a phone to explode. The assumption we are always in control is what needs to change.

Yes. We absolutely want to turn it into a “numbers game”, we want to make rational policy decisions.

> Do we really want to turn this into a numbers game?

The reality is lots of people die on the road and the numbers show this sad fact.

Now the reality is some of those who are killed, die from no fault of their own. They die at the hands of the other driver.

The sooner we can take away that human element from driving the better, because that one act will end up saving lots of lives.

> Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again

That is so untrue, at least for what happens here in Australia.

Here in Australia we have many hundreds in not thousands of repeat drink driving, speeding offenders on the roads, and short of locking them up there is no way to keep them off the roads.

Taking away their license makes no difference as they just drive without a license.

>Now the reality is some of those who are killed, die from no fault of their own. They die at the hands of the other driver.

That's way fewer

This seems like a very circular argument.

The argument in this thread seems to suggest we should be slow at adopting av technology because it could kill some innocent people.

Now I accept that point as a fact. There is no doubt people will die in av cars just like people die in cars today.

Yet, on the other we have human drivers killing innocent people today, which is acceptable collateral damage, even though introducing av technology would help to greatly reduce that number.

> Yet, on the other we have human drivers killing innocent people today, which is acceptable collateral damage, even though introducing av technology would help to greatly reduce that number.

Speaking for no one other than myself, vehicular deaths are not "acceptable collateral damage" so much as a statistical inevitability, one sought to be minimized as much as possible.

The problem with introducing autonomous vehicle technology, again IMHO, is the assumption that it "would help to greatly reduce that number."

This is not a known result.

> This is not a known result.

And without actually doing the implementation that question will never get answered.

But logic suggests they would help only because, with the exceptions of bugs in the system, the av:

. would not drive drunk

. would not speed

. would not run red lights

. would not get tired

. has better reaction times than humans

. has better eyesight than humans

. is not distracted by mobile phones, passengers or pretty girls/guys walking on the foot path

. is not susceptible to road rage

. etc etc.

>> This is not a known result.

> And without actually doing the implementation that question will never get answered.

Exactly. Which is why it is imperative the engineering community does not assume outcomes beforehand.

Much of the concerns you list I agree are likely benefits, with the "not drive drunk", "not get tired", and "not susceptible to road rage" items being a near certainty due to eliminating biological aspects.

What autonomous vehicles might not be better at could be:

. snow

. black ice

. mud

. severe thunderstorms

. able to operate in high dust environments

. adapting to rapid unexpected operating conditions

. when to run a red light (emergencies, external threats, some combination of conditions above)

Are these edge conditions? Maybe. Or you could call them functional requirements not often discussed.

All I'm saying is that there is a lot more to general-purpose driving than what can be shown in a limited setting.

IOW, show me an autonomous vehicle which can complete the Paris-Dakar Rally[0] and I'll show you someone who will say it's time for people to stop driving ;-).

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakar_Rally

EDIT: formatting

Humans learned to drive for years, initially, we will be better, but as time goes there is no chance against an automated solution. The whole industrialization process is just this and there were problems and bad things happened, but it works in the end.

I like how you buried that huge "if" in your second sentence:

> with the exceptions of bugs in the system

I specifically added that clarification only because I suspected without it, the argument would have been but what happens when a bug in the software causes the av to crash where as humans don't face have that problem types of arguments.

Being a software developer I have no doubt there will be bugs in these av software system.

But these systems will also include many fail safe overrides designed to minimize the impact of these occasional bugs.

>And without actually doing the implementation that question will never get answered.

That's BS. You can answer these questions with rigorous research (or a slow rollout).

Wishful thinking rears its ugly head again.

You can't possibly think that drunk drivers and those driving without a license are the target market for self-driving cars.

> You can't possibly think that drunk drivers and those driving without a license are the target market for self-driving cars.

You are correct, I don't think that.

That group just represents a small subset of the drivers that present a danger on the roads today.

Now since you asked, I would say the real target market for self-driving cars is big business.

They are the ones pushing hard for this technology, not for the safety aspects that I have focused on, but instead for the cost savings this technology will bring to their bottom line.

> Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again, or be punished if alcohol was involved. With an AV, currently nobody knows.

Easy to turn that around. Only individual humans learn from their mistakes - and even then, not always. But with AI, the whole fleet learns that lesson.

> Do we really want to turn this into a numbers game?

Yes, of course we want this to be a numbers game. What else would you have this discussion be about? Irrational feelings?

Uber's stats are worse. Humans have fatal accidents about once per 100 million miles. Uber's AVs have had one fatal accident, and they'd driven 2 million miles in Dec 2017 [1]. EDIT: While this isn't a huge amount of information to go on, it strongly suggests that Uber AV's are more dangerous than human drivers.

I mean, yes, it is fine for AVs to have an occasional bug --- as long as that occasional bug kills only kills one person per 100 million miles driven. But that's actually a pretty high bar.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...

If av technology does ever get rolled out in a big way, then I would expect to see suspect a big reduction in the numbers of road/vehicle related deaths.

Now if instead the road deaths stay the same or go up, then naturally that should should also spell the death of av technology.

Only if the companies get forced by regulations to actually target that metric.

The participants are in it for the profit, not for saving lives. The US health care misery is a prime example of what happens when you try to solve a situation through the market, which by definition has to treat human lives as an externality: People in the US die earlier than in any other first world country.

> People in the US die earlier than in any other first world country

The causes of death might not be the healthcare system ,no? What if the majority of these deaths are caused by bad diets and stress? Would you blame the healthcare system for it?

(I didn't mean to derail this thread, but want to answer you anyway)

You're right, one can't isolate one institution for topics as complex as these. I'm pretty sure it plays a role, though, as (ignoring fundamental differences in poverty rates, workplace regulations etc.) many countries employ the healthcare system to inform the population about healthy eating and offer incentives and free courses for coping with stress. Thats the beauty of a single payer system: Beyond ethics, the healthcare system has an intrinsic interest to prevent the preventable, as that is almost universally cheaper than bearing the cost of circulatory disorders later.

Bang on about the incentives part. I don't quite know about the healthcare system in the US but don't they have incentives to prevent diseases?

I'm just another armchair economist, but in a market based system the risk IMO is that the insuree grabs the preventive offers from insurer A and a few years later wanders off to a competitor with cheaper rates for that age bracket. So insurer A has no real incentive to prevent illnesses because in the long term, all insurees will switch anyway.

You "expect" why? What is your prediction based on?

There is no data to suggest that this will happen. Furthermore, if self-driving cars do take off, they will continue to be outnumbered by normal cars for a very long time. It's not even clear that they will or should be the majority.

Didn't uber shut down their self-driving attempts? Why are we still even talking about them if they are not even in the game anymore? (By their own volition or by virtue of being regulated, doesn't matter.)

> Except humans are also steering those 4000 pound blocks of metal around and not doing such a great job of it.

Humans making a reckless mistake while driving go to jail.

Are those that advocate the promise of this tech willing to say "Reckless commits and reckless code reviews send engineers to jail"?

What about industrial robots and computers malfunctioning and causing damage? Who goes to jail for it?

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