Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

The car hit Elaine Herzberg.

  Elaine's Obituary

  Elaine Marie Wood-Herzberg, 49, of Tempe, AZ passed away 
  on march 18, 2018.  A graveside service took place on 
  Saturday, April 21, 2018 at 2:00pm at Resthaven/Carr-
  Tenney Memorial Gardens in Phoenix.

  Elaine was born on August 2, 1969 in Phoenix, AZ to Danny 
  Wood and Sharon Daly.

  Elaine grew up in the Mesa/Apache Junction area and 
  attended Apache Junction High School. 

  Elaine was married to Mike Herzberg until he passed away.

  She was very creative and enjoyed drawing, coloring, and 
  writing poems.  She always had a smile on her face for 
  everyone she met and loved to make people laugh.  She 
  would do anything she could to help you, and was there to 
  listen when you needed it.

  Elaine is survived by her mother Sharon, of Apache 
  Junction, AZ; her father Danny, of Mayor, AZ; her son 
  Cody, of Apache Junction, AZ; her daughter Christine, of 
  Tempe, AZ; her grandchildren Charlie, Adrian, and Madelyn; 
  her sister Sheila, of Apache Junction, AZ; and many other 
  relatives.

But a homeless person is only ten points. So let's remember the car.

https://www.sonoranskiesmortuaryaz.com/obituary/6216521

https://afscarizona.org/2018/05/14/the-untold-story-of-elain...

This is why I will never use any service from Uber ever. I may be insignificant but at least I know I am doing my little part to not support this disgusting movement of "Move Fast and Break Things" which includes actual casualties. Everyone involved except the lowest pawns get away with it so the next company can do it even worse.

I hope you don't ever set foot in any other car either, considering they kill a million people every year. But a million is just a big number, it's not as powerful as 1 obituary.

This accident didn't save any lives though. It's just associated in your mind with saving lives. It's one more death; there's no decrease in traffic accidents to compensate.

So you're implying that our ability to take risks in the pursuit of massive systemic gains is exactly zero?

I'm fine with taking risks. I just don't think we should be making a cavelry charge into the machine guns. I know the payoff would be great if we succeeded, but it's still not a good idea.

I'm deeply excited by the possibilities of self-driving cars, and I would agree that it's necessary to take risks to make them a reality. The question is always if we're taking a necessary risk or just being reckless.

Uber has taken unnecessary risks and learned relatively little from them. They didn't need a fleet on public roads to tell them that object detection was terribly broken.

I actually don’t think the payoff will be great. What’s the real benefit here. Some jobs will be lost but now we have a large hackable software system that humans have little control over. If I have to sit in the front seat and watch the road then it really doesn’t do anything for me. And then there’s always going to be instances like this “I didn’t test that scenario” crap above.

Trading risks now for future gains is always tricky.

Suppose the CEO of Uber was a cannibal, and you framed letting him eat people as a necessary perk in order to keep him happy and the self-driving program on track. Would it be valid to say the number of people it's permissible for him to eat is exactly zero, even if it slows down the production of a truly self-driving car? I mean, what's one or two lives compared to 40,000 a year or whatever? There's a lot of uncertainty about the costs and benefits though, even if you strictly adhere to a utilitarian viewpoint.

It's a choice you can make, but it's worth noting that the alternative to getting SDCs working isn't "Nobody gets hit;" the alternative is "We keep having humans operate multi-ton vehicles with their known wetware attention and correction flaws and an average of 3,200 people die a day."

That doesn't imply Uber has the right chops to solve the problem, but I hope someone does.

False dichotomy, my friend.

Look at Europe (or heck, NYC) for alternatives to a car-dominated society:

* walkable, mixed-use, dense neighborhoods

* public transportation (rail-based, in particular)

* car-free streets (and cities)

The solution to traffic deaths is not self-driving cars. It's moving away from the Levittown-style suburbs that have proliferated the US since WW II.

Cool, so tear down American civic architecture to its bedrock and rebuild it from scratch.

Not impossible, but less than likely in the short horizon. We'll probably get working SDCs sooner.

True that, but not mutually exclusive.

We used to have streetcars. We tore then down. We can put them back.

And a self-driving streetcar is a more constrained problem to solve than a self-driving car.

Yup! Still nontrivial, but actively worked on[1].

[1]https://www.wired.com/story/siemens-potsdam-self-driving-str...

>The solution to traffic deaths is not self-driving cars.

Moving the world to a traffic free societies is not happening in a hurry, if ever. I'm writing this from a pedestrianised area in London but we still have plenty of cars.

Self driving type tech however has the potential to transform things in the next decade or so. Even if we don't have actual self driving the collision avoidance tech is getting quite good eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388790

Umm, have you lived in any non-car dominated city/country? Multimodal public transport is a thing.

The interesting difference is the “wetware” knows, without ever being trained, that it’s going to hit another person and stop the vehicle. If you think SDCs will reduce deaths at all I believe you’re ignoring reality. There are plenty of other options like public transport or remote work that is infinitely better then some cocky engineers thinking replacing a human brain is easy

6,000 pedestrian deaths a year suggests the wetware may not know to a level of certainty we should consider exclusively acceptable.

And I haven't met anybody working on the problem who thinks it is easy. But a lot of them do think it's worth the hassle if it will save even a fraction of tens of thousands of lives a year (even if fully autonomous operation is decades out, the semi-autonomous driving enhancements that have come from the research are already saving lives). Adopting and enhancing mass transit is also an excellent idea, but I think it's unrealistic to assume that will work exclusively. America has had quite a few decades to decide mass transit is something that everyone will jump on to, and it seems to not be happening.

And you still think deaths are going to be reduced by this? Read the article again. This will not go away, more pedestrians will be killed by self driving cars. Deaths will never be reduced to zero, even with self driving cars. But you will take jobs away from people driving for a living.

Public transport doesn’t work in the US because of how garbage it is. If the spent half an effort to build up a proper transportation system adoption rates would be different. I live in CA and we have some of the better transportation systems in the country. It takes me 1hr to get to work via car or 2-3 hours via public transport. Solve that problem and you’ll see people adopt it real quick.

Further the real problem is people not obeying traffic laws. Not that they can’t, they’re choosing not too. An easy solution is to but a device in vehicles that automatically cites a person for things like crossing solid lines and merging with no signal, speeding etc.

Deaths will never be reduced to zero, no. But if a self-driving car can cover twice as many miles between accidents as a regular car, the number of deaths per year plummets as more SDCs are added, assuming about the same number of total miles driven per year.

... And SDCs can be programmed to obey traffic laws.

As for jobs, we're not going to see jobs taken away by self-driving cars in the near future. More likely, we'll see a fleet of vehicles with driver assist technology derived from attempting to solve the self-driving problem that will make the lives of career drivers, such as those in the trucking industry, that much better and safer.

I agree that improvements to mass transit would also help. But those aren't mutually exclusive problems.

We have to keep in mind, it's not in either-or story, it's a statistics and numbers story. on the same day this woman was tragically killed, nine other people were killed in traffic accidents. They just don't make the news, because that tragedy has become so ubiquitous that we are utterly desensitized to it.

We shouldn't be.

There’s a lot of ifs and predictions here.

How many deaths would be prevented by automatically citing a vehicle for breaking traffic laws? This is a much cheaper and simpler option than an SDC.

SDCs can be programmed to obey laws, I never said they couldn’t. However a software system will not reach the same level of reasoning a human brain can in our lifetimes. Compute capacity isn’t even close yet. So again, an SDC / Software System / AI is no replacement for a human brain.

We have driver assist technology now. No company in the world is going to keep a human driver on the books when they can be replaced by a machine. History is there as proof. It’s not a question of if they will be replaced, it’s how long it will take to make the technology robust enough.

They don’t make the news because death is a normal, acceptable thing for us. People die, accidents happen. Covering every person that dies would not at all be time efficient.

There’s also something to be said for darwinism here, but I’m not going to get into that.

> They don’t make the news because death is a normal, acceptable thing for us.

That's how human cognition deals with things we don't think we have control over. There was a time when smallpox deaths were just "part of God's plan."

I disagree the car crash body count is inevitable or needs to stay normal any more than some people's children just naturally succumb to smallpox.

> There’s also something to be said for darwinism here, but I’m not going to get into that.

Yes, I definitely wouldn't. It's an offensive attitude to have around people who have lost friends and loved ones this way to imply they weren't good enough to live.

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