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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

If Tesla's AutoPilot was regulated like the airline industry with post-crash reviews, mandatory improvements, and open sharing of data we likely would see that. At the current time Tesla's system is proprietary/secret and their oversight is lax.

If we look at the history of airline safety, going back further, we can see that it took many years and numerous crashes to get to the point where it became well regulated and crashes were independently investigated. Before government stepped in, private companies weren't doing a great job and their biases (inc. bad headlines/liability/cost) got in the way of improving passenger safety.

So let's absolutely keep with the airline analogy and regulate Tesla's AutoPilot like the airline industry.

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The NTSB does actually investigate their stuff. And then it does issue recommends.

I see a cost issue, easy to justify a full investigation every time a commercial plane crashes, how do you do a full investigation every time somebody crashes a car or is crashed into. How do you get the improvement loop that the airline industry had?

I thought the topic was AutoPilot crashes, not all car crashes. Is AutoPilot crashing enough to be cost prohibitive?

Not currently. If we get to mixed 50/50 traffic...possibly. (Saying "but won't happen, because magic future technology" would be literal handwaving)

If we required full investigations now, while the numbers are small enough for it to be feasible, then perhaps by the time we get to 50/50 traffic, the technology will be that much better.

At least plane crashes are usually mechanical and not software, or it's straightforward software (hello MCAS), investigating a machine learning's system behavior ("what input lead it produce this output?") sounds like a more expensive problem.

Until you look you don't know if i was hardware, software, road conditions or user, unless you look its just a a pile of twisted metal.

We already investigate nearly every car crash, it's just that we usually find one of the drivers at fault instead of one of the car manufacturers. The resources are there, currently provided mostly through police and insurance agencies.

Hopefully it takes less than ~50 years which the airline industry took to get to that point. Seems that this would need to become a popular opinion before becoming reality.

Regulation saves lives. We don't even have to look at the airline industry. Seat belts saved lives. Tailpipe emission controls saved lives. Tesla's Enhanced Autopilot and other Level 2 (partial autonomy) solutions will save lives.

Not always - it has to be appropriate - there are cases where regulation costs lives by locking in suboptimal solutions because the costs to re-certify can be too high.

We need to have the appropriate balance.

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