Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So in this environment we can very soon be stuck in an uncanny valley where self-driving cars would already be a net positive in reducing road fatalities but at a level that is still generally considered unacceptable.

View on HN

>when you consider how high road mortality is

Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the rate is not really all that high.

That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner.

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

That seems an unrealistic bar especially as a hypothetical self-driving vehicle will be co-existing with human-driven cars even on main roads for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, airliners are flown by a pair of trained professionals, within an air traffic control system that minimizes their exposure to most serious threats, and are mostly (some bird strikes, sensor failures, etc. notwithstanding) flying under conditions that are fairly predictable. OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)

I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light (otherwise - it's not a very good collision avoidance system!)

It can react faster to an object. But, under at least some circumstances, a human might recognize potentially questionable road conditions in a way that an autonomous vehicle would not. (Of course, presumably the human could also tell the autonomous vehicle to slow down.) And I've definitely seen animals at the side of the road looking they may be inclined to run out.

Overall, I don't really disagree on net though.

Something here is unrealistic, that's the point. I'm not so sure it's the reliability threshold for self-driving cars though. I'm more amazed at our continuing acceptance of the risks in driving. Having two pilots, air traffic control, maintenance standards, etc, are all regulation driven. Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?

> OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)

I'd expect the opposite actually. Humans are incredibly slow reacting in the best of circumstances and they often drive distracted. They also suck at reacting even when they do which is why we now have automatic systems to reinforce braking in presumed emergencies as humans don't consistently apply full brakes in emergency situations. Collision avoidance in a few milliseconds with reliable reactions should make quite a few of those scenarios much better.

>Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?

I think it boils down to "because we can and still have a viable commercial airline industry." (And general aviation is much riskier than commercial airlines.) Whereas were we to vastly increase the training, maintenance schedules, monitoring of driver alertness, and requirements to have all the latest safety features, you're probably effectively eliminating driving for most people who can't just hire a professional driver/car.

For many things, we accept that we could make things safer if we wanted to. But were we to do so, we'd effectively be banning the activity or at least severely restricting it. (Which is probably one reason why we don't really have flying cars.)

> as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars

Why do you think this? It makes sense to me intuitively that people would be willing to accept more death causes by other people than more opaque and unfamiliar autonomous systems, but I haven't seen any hard data on this and am curious. Is this mentioned somewhere in the Wikipedia article that you linked or did you just share that to demonstrate the other number you mention?

The Wikipedia article is just for the fatality statistics. The expectation of airliner reliability for self-driving cars is what I get from the discussions around this. Here on HN and in other places. Maybe it will be lower and the uncanny valley will be smaller but I wouldn't bet on it. People are much more afraid of flying than of driving even though driving is much riskier. And that's because you're much more willing to accept risks when you think you're in control of them. Self-driving cars will take that illusion of personal control away.

Gotcha, OK. Yeah, I agree with you directionally.

This statistic is in terms of passenger miles, but airplanes travel much faster per car, and airplane journeys are normally much longer than a typical car ride.

So, planes might be around 500x better per pax-mile, but per pax-journey they're just about 5x better.

Incidentally, the fatality rate for self driving cars should be also around 5x better (per vehicle mile) than human drivers for wide spread acceptance, according to an 2018 study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180530132959.h...

Per-distance statistics may stretch the risk perception as people use planes for different trips than cars. But per journey statistics seems a much bigger error in the other direction. Fatalities with airliners are pretty close to 0 per year whereas 30k+ people a year die in car accidents. Most people know of someone that died that way whereas any airplane accident is national news. 5x really understates that difference. I don't think per-journey numbers are reasonable as a comparison.

The study showing 5x is quite neat, thanks. I expect this to be a floor for the difference though. Once some of the deaths with self-driving cars are shown to be things that human drivers would easily avoid the requirements will be higher, even if in total 5x better has been achieved. For widespread acceptance I'd bet on 10x as a minimum and 100x at the extreme, depending on what types of accidents are in there that shape the perception.

I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers.

Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might be better but that doesn't fully paint a picture of what those numbers would look like.

I also think the 'will randomly kill people, but rarely' aspect of self-driving cars will be majorly off-putting on a very human level.

And finally there's a perception issue here - the self-driving hype is around the idea that the car is effectively being driven by a far better driver than a human, the second it turns out it does really crazy things sometimes (doesn't even have to involve fatalities necessarily) is also going to put people off I think.

I personally prefer the idea of driver assists (responsibly developed so drivers aren't just distracted) aiding driver safety while we work on a supplemental self-driving solution, or perhaps as discussed in the article create some infrastructure along roads to make things more certain.

I am far from being against self-driving cars, I just feel the timeline is longer than currently hyped.

I agree completely. My take from the situation is much more that we are far far too lenient with our standards for cars, roads, and particularly drivers. We've set the bar so low that the technology has a good chance of clearing it soon but only serve to reveal how actually uncomfortable we are with such a low bar that we've normalized over time.

In many parts of North America you cannot function in society without a license. Therefore, we have sympathy for people because are we going to ask people who aren't good drivers to put their lives on hold on the off chance they kill someone? Better to let them all drive and vilify the unfortunate ones that do. However, with machines they have no personal lives so they are afforded no slack. Humans get to make mistakes because they are only human, but machines get no such affordances... even if the net benefit is there.

Another point might be attribution. It's horrible when a driver is tired, drunk or simply misses something - but on a human level, you can understand what's going on. Also, you know the guy at fault and that he will be punished (at least, somewhat).

An autonomous vehicle, in comparison, is not relatable at all. Some equation delivered some wrong result, maybe it was something in the training set, so that's why the car suddenly drove into you. Bad luck. If you're lucky, you get some damage payments from the car company, if you happen to have enough money for a very good lawyer.

Sure, as a technical person, I understand some of the possible errors, but it still feels like a complex system that one cannot relate too with hardly understandable edge case behaviour. That's probably why we're so much more lenient with humans.

Might be interesting to integrate an AI based self.drivinf system with several additional driver assistance systems, each using fundamentally different algorithmic solutions, and perhaps even some different sensors.

I think what further compounds this is that normally responsibility for accidents is 'distributed' across the population. whereas with autonomous driving it's going to be a single/a few companies shouldering it all. Being even responsible even just for 10% of total road fatalities (~4000 deaths per year) would be absolutely ruinous if they're held liable for them.

There's (arguably) the limited exception of pharmaceuticals--and, even there, there's a government fund to handle people who get sick or die because of vaccines. But it's hard to otherwise identify products used by consumers that, when maintained and used properly, sometimes randomly kill people and we shrug our shoulders and say "Stuff happens. Still a net benefit to society." We certainly don't do it today in the case of manufacturing or design defects in vehicles.

Responsibility for accidents is concentrated in insurance companies. Nothing substantial will change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com