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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

ok, controversial counterpoint: maybe some number of deaths is worth it.

We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to find and fix bugs is to implement the thing in production and see what happens. As you point out, it exposes problems that testing and design just can't.

I see people here obsessing over how much will change if we had fleets of AVs. Maybe shaving five years off the wait time is worth N number of human lives. Especially if N < the number of lives will ultimately be saved if the technology is perfected years earlier.

Of course I wouldn't want myself or my loved ones to make that sacrifice. I don't want to die in a regular car accident either. Given the upside, speeding up AV development may be worth the risk?

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That's perfectly fair if the cars will be exclusively tested on the families of the engineers & managers working on those cars.

This would set the incentives straight at least.

I would be more comfortable limiting it to the families of the managers. The engineers, due to our legal and social system, have almost no control whatsoever over when the product gets released, what tools they have access to, how much time they are given for testing, etc. All of those decisions are driven by management who have been guaranteed by courts that there simply is no degree of corner-cutting which could ever possibly amount to criminal negligence because software is involved.

People don't really care about automotive safety that much. If they were, they would not drink and drive, text and drive, do their makeup and drive, not wear their seatbelts, speed, not slow down in school zone or other dense area, take their eyes off the road to pick up the phone, so on and so forth.

For every demand they make of OTHER PEOPLE to improve the safety of travel, they are not willing to do even /10 of that.

> ok, controversial counterpoint: maybe some number of deaths is worth it.

Not if you wish to win the hearts and minds of the general population at large. As grandparent points out, the coverage seems disproportionate, but that's because it interest people, and they are generally sceptical of letting computers drive their cars.

While technically unrelated, the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS scandal hasn't done much good either for the further automation of transport systems.

People dying at the 'hands' of AVs will lead to pushback from the general population, and political points can be scored by siding with this view, leading to tigther regulation if not an outright ban some places on AVs.

The real question is; will either the slow and thorough approach or the quick and dirty approach roll out larger AV fleets faster than the other? In any case, it'll probably be decades, before there are significant AV fleets.

Auto deaths were EXTREMELY common when they first came out. Pedestrian deaths, too.

But the car was such a valuable and exciting technological leap that people just lived with the risks.

It'll be the same here too, if the technology is valuable and life changing.

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