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Comment by reedwolf | Hacker News Reader

To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.

Well I hope you are going to be that egg not me. Cuz multi billion corp is too cheap to properly test their product and just deploy into production and see what happens and patch it later.

We can either have fast technological progress, or we can be completely tied up in bureaucratic red tape, with every potential innovation having to go through endless "oversight" committees staffed by non-technical airheads.

I know which I prefer.

> We can either have fast technological progress, or we can be completely tied up in bureaucratic red tape, with every potential innovation having to go through endless "oversight" committees staffed by non-technical airheads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

That's a false dilemma.

That is a false-dichotomy. We can have something more in the middle, or at least less an extreme as "let cars just drive wherever without any tests and when it kills someone just say o well, that's progress".

In this particular case, Uber got a deal with the mayor (Governor? I can't remember) of the city to do testing, and it was clear the government bureaucrat allowed them to do whatever, and then coordinated with the police after Uber killed a pedestrian to fabricate evidence that looked like the woman came out of nowhere.

I would say that is really far from "endless oversight" and much more into the "just mow them down one at a time until you get it right" territory.

All progress involves a certain amount of irreducible risk and I'm sure that any self driving car program, even if well run, will at some point end up killing someone by mistake - though hopefully after far more than the normal number of miles driven per fatality average.

But in this case it looks like Uber was really cutting corners that they shouldn't have cut and I think that Uber does deserve sanction for that.

Do you want to be the egg? Or your husband/wife? Maybe your children?

Would you say that if that was your family in front of that car ? Very ignorant comment.

It's how we've arrived at where we are now, and why you have all the things you take for granted. Buildings, planes, borders, they all had a human expense.

A classic "tragedy of the commons" problem. Inarguably having only self-driving shared vehicles on the street will be massively positive to society (public space now reserved for parking will be public space, accidents due to drivers being tired/under the influence will not be a thing any more, resource waste for cars standing around 99.99% of their lifetime will not be a thing any more), but there will be a not-so-small amount of sacrifices on the way (be it people dying or being injured by prototypes, or massive job losses because the demand for cars will drop).

Air travel was horribly accident prone too, for decades, and now it is one of the safest forms of travel in developed countries - and for electric/autonomous travel, it will be the same.

Yeh agree with both of your comments but is this the way to justify the error that caused someone’s life ? Almost makes it sound like “oh well it happens”. Comments like these are showing why software like that was rushed to test against live human. What about showing some empathy?

If you set out to make an omelette and a person ends up dying because of what you've done, you have exceeded your license to break a few eggs.

yeah, as long as _you_ are not the one in the pan

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