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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> No one is putting an actual self-driving car on the market using this specific data set. Disingenuous to pretend this is any indication of the data using by serious companies in the space

Are you sure about that? What about "non-serious" companies? Various fly-by-night self-driving startups?

I mean, this sounds like the machine learning equivalent of "no serious business is pulling random bits of code from StackOverflow or whatever tutorial popped up first in the search results", and yet I think everyone who worked with software for more than few years can confirm that companies absolutely do it, and a lot.

(Tangentially, PHP got a bad rap in large part because of this - people not knowing how to do things correctly copying code from tutorials written by people who didn't know it either; these days, JS ecosystem is getting a bad rap for having such bad code wrapped in neat and easy-to-install NPM packages.)

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I've mentioned to a few people now that the first generation of self-driving cars don't scare me that much. It will be weird, but I assume that special care will be taken and the cars themselves will be quite risk-averse. I'm scared about the next generation of self-driving cars when we have "solved it" and the race is on to get cars out quickly and at low cost (and things like in-depth testing are out of budget). Hopefully regulations and testing frameworks catch up by then, but who knows.

IMO to be "scared" of self driving cars they need to be more dangerous than any other random car on the street today, and the bar for that is pretty low.

Nope, with other cars you know the factors that increase your risks (fog, drunk driving, distractions). You can make decisions, like not getting into a car with a drunk friend.

With machine learning you never know when it might mistake the back of a semi for an overpass or soemthing.

Also, not to fear monger too much, but if this ends up happening there will inevitably be a period where people still assume that self driving cars are foolproof, and as a result, a lot of pedestrians/other drivers will get blamed for incidents that weren't in fact their fault.

Thank you for pointing this out. Every time they show road accident statistics as an argument for the safety of self-driving cars or airlines, I wonder how is the risk conditional on me in the vehicle. Surely the risk substantially decreases than the population statistics in case of road accidents, since I am much more prudent than the average. However, the risk remains the same in the case of airlines or self-driving cars since I am not in control.

No pedestrian makes the decision to get hit by a drunk driver, which is the more relevant situation in the context of this post I think

> I assume that special care will be taken and the cars themselves will be quite risk-averse.

Bold assumption that's already got a counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

Wikipedia already has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...

Along with your pedestrian death there were five (!!!) driver deaths.

There's a reason why places like Germany don't want Tesla to use the term 'autopilot' because it's reckless endangerment.

>There's a reason why places like Germany don't want Tesla to use the term 'autopilot' because it's reckless endangerment.

If Tesla weren't a US company I'm sure they'd have already been sued for billions for labeling their assisted driving system autopilot.

The US is the country where you can pay millions for not having a sticker on the microwave showing that you shouldn't dry your cat in there.

Are you sure about that? What about "non-serious" companies? Various fly-by-night self-driving startups?

Fly-by-night self-driving startups will at some point run into issues with the NHTSA. George Hotz self-driving car project was shut down as soon as he announced that he'd start selling some prototype.

States require permits just to be allowed to test self-driving prototypes on the open road. I don't know what the requirements are, but they're probably subject to some kind of review that's more than just filling in a form.

It doesn't look like it was shut down? http://comma.ai

> In the days that followed, Hotz abandoned his plans to sell Comma One directly. Instead, he embarked on a regulatory workaround: this current path of selling just the hardware and open-sourcing the code behind it, meaning it is available for free. He says often, “We are not selling a consumer product.”

No one stopped Uber, no one has stopped Tesla (Tesla hasn't been able deal with regression testing on a lane finding system...)

They haven't shut down, they are selling their prototype and I think they have recently put out a new model.

Given HN's general suspicion of government regulation, especially its quality and accuracy, I'm surprised to see people argue here that it's sufficient to counter the "move fast and break things" mentality. Especially given that regulatory arbitrage (moving from CA to AZ) was involved in Uber's vehicular manslaughter.

> Various fly-by-night self-driving startups?

What is the alternative other than holding these companies responsible for the deaths they might cause ? The only solution I see is mandating very high insurance requirement than a human driver. For example 25M per death they might cause.

Perhaps reasonable regulations involving extensive pre-street testing and solid public documentation of ML design decisions and training data sources before allowing use in uncontrolled environments? Also, criminal liability during initial deployment?

Of course, real responsibility is probably unfashionable...

(edit: I'm personally in high-stakes time-sensitive diagnostic ML development, so...)

> these days, JS ecosystem is getting a bad rap for having such bad code wrapped in neat and easy-to-install NPM packages.)

Is it? IME nobody seems to give a flying fuck outside of HN. Much like the PHP days. Or maybe I've never been in the right workplaces to notice.

I work in Ruby on Rails (currently with a React frontend, but previous jobs used Angular) in the Midwest. IME almost everything around the "recent" JS ecosystem (npm, npx, node, yarn, grunt, react, jsx, etc) are used (begrudgingly) when necessary, but are just the butt of jokes 99% of the time.

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