Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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> My example is contrived.

Pretty much. I think if you're going to make an argument like "accidents by teenagers, senior citizens and drunks don't matter" you need to put some numbers behind that.

I mean, if you had a teenager or a family member with a substance problem, would you feel safer with them in a Tesla? If so, then I really don't think I understand your point.

Basically you're just saying that you, personally, as a young single man, feel like you're much better at driving than the median driver. So you want a car that is significantly better than even the median before you will "feel safe".

Alternate framing: it doesn't matter how safe you think your driving is, you're still sharing the road with grandparents. And you (if you're being rational about it) want them in a Tesla.

> And you (if you're being rational about it) want them in a Tesla

Right. Rationally, we all want folks who are worse than the state-of-the-art FSD AI to be using FSD. But thinking that the "very low bar" that has to be cleared is drunk drivers misses the point that most drivers are not drunk. So it's much less impressive to a "safe" human driver to clear the low bar.

> But thinking that the "very low bar" that has to be cleared is drunk drivers

I said median, not drunk driver. Existing shipping autopilot is already saving DUI fatalities. This feels like a strawman to me...

> I said median, not drunk driver.

Right, and I originally said:

> I think one of the reasons there's such an inherent distrust of Tesla's FSD is that when it fails, it fails in scenarios in which people can easily see themselves succeeding.

The above-the-median driver is rationally able to see themselves beating Tesla's FSD. But importantly, even below-the-median drivers are likely to think they can beat Tesla's FSD for as long as the mistakes it makes seem naive and trivially-avoided by them. Human trust will require a higher bar than "beats the median human on 5 KPIs, but still on rare occasions decapitates someone because it doesn't know what a semi truck looks like from the side".

FSD advocates seem to want to focus on the "beats the median human" bit. I'm saying it's unlikely they'll gain much public trust until the "can't recognize a sideways semi" stories die down.

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