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Comment by mountainboy | Hacker News Reader

until the first pedestrian gets killed...

>10 pedestrians are killed each year by human drivers in SF, and almost exclusively they are the drivers fault (not only by definition, but also based on an impartial assessment of the situations).

People will not care, and I also do not think these automated cars are going to kill any pedestrians anyways.

If you're setting the over-under at 0.5, I'll take the over...

> People will not care

I don't believe that.

One pregnant woman gets hi, and she and her unborn child die, and there will be so much anger and pressure on the politcians, everything will get outlawed.

Human drivers are individuals... John Doe killed someone, blame John Doe. Autonomous car kills someone, blame all autonomous cars!

Consensus is a gradient, and representative consensus is multiple gradients.

Techies are a very narrow band in any of these gradients.

Regular people are very wide bands, and there's a reason horror sci-fi movies where robots kill humankind are extremely popular.

You're both right and wrong at the same time. The media gets to decide, as always, what we're collectively outraged about. Or to be more specific, the people who control the media. So if you want to predict if people are going to care when someone gets killed by a robocar, it depends on who stands to make or lose money if they do or don't.

It seems more likely that the manufacturer will blamed. Society already has experience dealing with inhuman harm from devices. If a phone explodes on its own, no one is calling for all phones to be banned.

If a phone explodes, many businesses outlaw that brand and maybe narrow that to a model. With prior example, do you think the same won’t happen with a self-driving car?

That's my point. The manufacturer and model of the self-driving car will be blamed and possibly banned, but not all self-driving cars will be.

A small number of Chevy Bolts have had their batteries ignite spontaneously, nobody has been killed, and now there are a bunch of parking garages that have banned Chevy Bolts from parking there.

Maybe not all autonomous cars will be banned when someone is killed, but I wouldn't be shocked if the same thing happened to whatever company that built the car in question that happened to Uber after they killed an innocent bystander.

> Maybe not all autonomous cars will be banned when someone is killed

Well that's exactly my point. The manufacturer and model of the self-driving car will be blamed and possibly banned, but not all self-driving cars will be. The first pedestrian death isn't going to be blamed on all autonomous cars.

People will care a disproportionate amount, I think.

When a human kills someone "that's a bad driver, take away their license" when a machine kills someone "that's a bad machine, ban it"

Tesla already did it. No one seems to care?

I don't remember in incident where a Tesla killed a pedestrian?

I know Uber did, and now they don't have a self-driving car program anymore. not necessarily causation, but it can't have helped.

> not necessarily causation, but it can't have helped

I do think it was causal: when the official report came out it was clear that their system was completely inappropriate for autonomous driving. https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash

Because we don't know if it did it. All we know is that a Tesla was involved with a fatal crash involving a person changing their tire on the Long Island Expressway. [1]

There's been no confirmation whether Autopilot was enabled.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-6127ae797c528...

Just in case you're not aware of, Tesla has a long history of fatal cases driven by Autopilot[1] with the first case below:

    This entire incident occurred without any actual input or action taken by the driver of the Tesla vehicle, except that the driver had his hands on the steering wheel as measured by Tesla’s Autosteer system. Indeed, the Tesla Model X was equipped with an Event Data Recorder (EDR) which is intended to enable Tesla to collect data and record information from its vehicles and also provides information on various processes of the vehicle’s functioning systems when a crash occurs. The information regarding vehicle speed as extracted from the Tesla Model X provides proof of the foregoing facts[2]

[1] https://www.tesladeaths.com/ [2] https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Te...

I think it will matter whether or not the car was operating in FSD or not. People can chalk up AP failures to idiot drivers misusing a feature, and then blame that person. When it's Tesla claiming to be fully in control, that's a different story. Though I guess they're probably not making that claim yet for 'FSD'.

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