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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

Are humans AGI? They kill 35k on US roads alone each year. If Level 5 means 0 deaths per year, then it will never happen until the singularity. It is quite possible America's safety first attidue will let 35k people die a year because automatic cars would kill hundreds per year, but I hope not.

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I wonder if all this AI to build self driving cars should have gone into AI that simply saves lives a lot more easily: - detect if the driver is insane, drunk, swerving (tired?), stolen. - detect baby in the backseat parked, and temp rising?

If all the AI did was decide you're unfit to drive, that it take over for a few minutes to get to the next stop and pull over and call the cops on you, we might save more lives by that alone.

Automatic crash avoidance is already a thing that's steadily rolling out to more cars, and improving over time.

For stopping people from driving, you'd have to solve the social issues there first somehow. "Our car stops you from driving if it thinks you're incompetent" isn't something that sells more cars. Maybe the government could mandate it, and that's the government's responsibility.

> "Our car stops you from driving if it thinks you're incompetent" isn't something that sells more cars.

I could see something like that as part of a “supervised driver” safety feature. Like maybe you enable it when your kids use the car or if you rent the car out to strangers.

The AI that you talk about should be used in traffic lights. They should affix cameras to every single traffic light and have AI figure out the traffic flows. Then they can make traffic much more efficient throughout an entire city. It should be able to track a car through its entire journey through license plate recognition, and then adjust traffic throughout the entire city so that it's the most efficient for the amount of traffic.

So basically a super high tech car breathalyzer that uses some black box algorithm to decide if I'm drunk and call the police on me? The self driving car seems a little bit cooler.

Why not just install the existing breathalyzers in every car right now?

Yes but who am I going to go after if another car hits me if its autonomous? The manufacturer which is a 10 year plus lawsuit taking up a large portion of my life. I definitely think keeping the responsibility to the person driving the vehicle is the only reason the death toll is somewhat acceptable to society.

This seems backwards to me. If you get hit by Google, you’ll wake up in a hospital bed full of flowers from ambulance-chasing lawyers who are salivating over the chance to represent you so they can get in on that sweet settlement money.

Hit by a human, decent chance they flee and if you track them down, it’ll probably be some uninsured drunk with a negative net worth.

I was assuming after widespread adoption, some friendly obscurely worded legislation and the current supreme court.

You'd probably go after the cars insurer just the same whether it's driven by a human or a computer.

For reference, 35k deaths in the USA is about 1 death every 85 million miles driven. In comparison, Waymo has supposedly driven about 20 million miles. It's good that Waymo has had no deaths so far, because otherwise it would likely be far less safe than human drivers if there were any.

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