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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

To add to the ‘different set of accidents’ point - the accidents caused by autonomous cars will most likely also be harder to accept. They will be accidents that a human driver (at least with the benefit of hindsight) would appear unlikely to have caused.

Things like that Tesla driving straight into a wall and killing its driver. Or not seeing a van right in front of it because the sun was too bright. Things where a bit of common sense (not something AI excels at) might have avoided them.

On the flip side the lives saved will be based on having super human reaction times / situational awareness and will be things no person would have been able to do.

So maybe there’ll be a battle of public opinion (and PR!) weighing these things against each other.

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I think you’re going to find human caused deaths to be just as bizarre if you ever look into them. You might think people are generally ok drivers but when you’re looking at each fatality as the worst mistake per 1.5+ Million hours driven people are doing some truly dumb things.

On that time scale you can expect people to have fallen asleep at the wheel several times. They spent literally months looking at their phones rather than paying attention to the road etc. Because here’s the thing most accidents aren’t fatal, for every death you’re going to see a host of accidents that should have been avoided and tens if not hundreds of thousands of mistakes that could have resulted in a serious accident but didn’t.

I was driving on 280 once in clear weather and light traffic, and the car ahead of me suddenly swerved left, swerved right and went tumbling across all lanes and ended up upside down on the shoulder. It was a really bizarre thing to witness. And both people inside seemed mostly OK.

This is why it's important that the set of drivers killed in AI accidents will be different. The ones killed in accidents up to this point are the ones being reckless (and sometimes, the people they inevitably hit).

The ones killed in accidents involving self driving cars will include people who drove responsibly or even defensively in the past. They will also be among higher income earners for the first few years, while self-driving capabilities are still too expensive to be included in the average car.

Moreover, people like to think they're in the set that wouldn't get themselves killed by their own driving, regardless of how poorly they drive.

People get killed by others' driving mistakes all the time.

But then we assume that autonomous cars will replace these bad drivers - which is a pretty unsubstantiated claim, and the same percentage of drivers still be this bad when autonomous cars are more popular - and we don’t have enough data to conclude that autonomous cars are better at dealing with these bad drivers than competent humans (and I assume this is not true as of yet)

No, if there are lives saved by self-driving cars, they will primarily be in instances where the driver was distracted/drunk/high. Thus any competent lawyer workin a case against a self-driving car company in the case where their car killed someone, will argue (rightly!) that those sane lives could also have been saved by less high-tech measures, such as AI detecting undesired human behaviour and putting the car in limp-home-mode or similar.

In that case you are saving the same lives and not causing any new fatalities, but it's not a super cool tech that will attract lots of investment. So the choice to implement self driving was ultimately putting profits over human lives.

I think detecting impaired and distracted drivers is a lot harder than you think and more high tech since you need that detection in addition to the ability to limp home.

There are very trivial situations where even current Teslas are safer than previous cars: while I wouldn’t trust my life to Autopilot, I’d rather drive next to a drunk driver using autopilot than one driving “manually”. Other simple things, like detecting excessive swerving and drifting out of the land, would be relatively straightforward signals to the car to maybe limit speed and encourage pulling over.

Detection is pretty much where AIs excel so I doubt it would be a hard problem. And it could also just disable driving the car and that’s it, saving the same amount of people.

What you are looking for is a horse.

I've never had my car intentionally try to kill me, but a horse has. :)

There's actually a potential safety advantage from the public's irrational reaction to autonomous driving deaths (irrational if compared to their response to human driving driving deaths):

Autonomous driving deaths will be much more scrutinized. In the press, by regulators, by competitors, by the companies involved. There's likely to be a lot more data involved. The scrutiny may ironically increase as it becomes safer, maybe becoming a lot like plane crashes, in fact, where each one is scrutinized by groups of experts and fixes are put in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening.

The safer it is, the rarer and more novel the fatalities are and therefore the more resources will be spent on fixing the safety issues.

That is, if autonomous driving is allowed. If it's not allowed because overall irrational fear of autonomous driving, then that feedback cycle can't happen.

So the paranoia isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it doesn't cause paralysis.

It isn't just a perception issue. It is going to depend on how we assign blame. Today if a human causes an accident that kills someone, the family can sue the human and get some from their insurance company, but most insurance policies have a relatively low limit on what they will pay. As far as the individual goes, the median net worth of someone in the US is less than $100,000. You can sue, but there really isn't that much money to get.

However, with self-driving vehicles, if you sue the manufacture of the vehicle, they have significantly deeper pockets. This is going to effectively keep us stuck in the place where no matter how good self driving cars become, the responsibility remains with the driver.

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