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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

You could be right.

My alternative possible timeline interpretation is that two forces collide and make self-driving inevitable.

The first force is the insurance industry. It's really hard to argue that humans are more fallible than even today's self-driving setups, and at some point the underwriters will take note and start premium-blasting human drivers into the history books.

The second force is the power of numbers; as more and more self-driving cars come online, it becomes more and more practical to connect them together into a giant mesh network that can cooperate to share the roads and alert each other to dangers. Today's self-driving cars are cowboy loners that don't play well with others. This will evolve, especially with the 5G rollout.

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This reminds me that Tesla itself is starting to offer insurance, and it can do so at a much lower rate. I assume this is because:

1) Teslas crash much less often, mostly due to autopilot.

2) Tesla can harvest an incredible amount of data from one of their cars and so they can calculate risk better

how much does a Tesla know about the state of its driver, e.g. to detect distraction, tiredness or intoxication?

Does Tesla see when you speed and increase your premiums?

Having high-speed steel boxes carrying human lives and what else react on messages from untrusted sources. Hmm. What could go wrong?

I'm going to ignore the snark and pretend as though this is a good faith argument, because we're on Hacker News - and I believe that means you're a smart person I might disagree with, and I'm challenging you.

I want to understand why being in a high-speed steel/plastic box with humans (overrated in some views) controlled by a computer scares you so much. Is it primal or are you working off data I do not have? Please share. I am being 100% sincere - I need to understand your perspective.

To re-state in brief: (individual) autonomous self-driving tech today tests "as safe as" ranging to "2-10x safer" than a typical human driver. This statistic will likely improve reliably over the next 5-10 years.

However, I am talking about an entire societal mesh network infrastructure of cars, communicating in real-time with each other and making decisions as a hive. As the ratio flips quickly from humans to machines, I absolutely belive that you would have to be quantifiably unsane to want to continue endangering the lives of yourself, your loved ones and the people in your community by continuing to believe that you have more eyes, better reaction and can see further ahead than a mesh of AIs that are constantly improving.

So yeah... I don't understand your skepticism. Help me.

The risk is a bad actor could hack into this network and control the cars

Security-minded thinking dictates that we should move forward with the assumption that it will happen. The important outcome is not "we can't do anything as a society because bad men could hurt us" but "how do we mitigate and minimize this kind of event so that progress can continue".

Look: I don't want my loved ones in the car that gets hacked, and I'm not volunteering yours, either. Sad things are sad, but progress is inevitable and I refuse to live in fear of something scary possibly happening.

It is with that logic that I can fly on planes, ride my bike, deposit my money in banks, have sex, try new foods and generally support Enlightenment ideals.

I would rather trust a mesh of cars than obsess over the interior design of a bunker.

Totally agree.

If all the cars in the area know one of the cars is about to do something and can adjust accordingly then it will be so much safer than what we have now it is almost unimaginable.

It would seem at some point in the future, people are not going to even want to be on the road with a human driver who is not part of the network.

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