Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

> We are being asked to close our eyes, take a leap of faith

Actually, you're being asked to "Always watch the road in front of you and be prepared to take corrective action at all times. Failure to do so can result in serious injury or death.", until FSD gets released :)

Do you trust cab drivers to "be trained on every edge case under the sun"? Self driving only needs to beat humans, who have some serious flaws, not achieve perfection.

View on HN

If all airplanes needed to do is "be safer than cars" then no one would ever fly.

> Self driving only needs to beat humans, who have some serious flaws, not achieve perfection.

In particular, though, it needs to beat good human drivers, not average ones.

It depends. If it is equal to the average human driver then being on the road would be a benefit because below average drivers (drunk, elderly, tired, etc) could use FSD while above average drivers drove themselves.

I would argue the average human driver is actually a good driver. People argue that Tesla training their system to mimic a human driver is a bad idea because then it will replicate bad human driver behavior, but the fact is that human drivers don’t end up killing themselves or others the vast, vast majority of the time. George Hotz of Comma.ai brought up an interesting point about this on one of his Lex Fridman podcast appearances. He said from the driving data they’ve gathered, it seems that average drivers are good in the same ways, while especially bad drivers are bad in unique ways. The result is that the bad driver behavior in the data is pretty much overwhelmed and washed out by the abundance of good driver behavior in the data. Add to this the fact that self-driving systems still have things like automatic emergency braking, and I’d say you’ve got a pretty safe driver.

How can you know that it beats humans? You would have to drive tens of trillions of miles to have any worthwhile data on this, all the while putting humans at risk.

Why do you need tens of trillions of miles?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com