From 2016. For one, I appreciate Waymo's cautious approach that values human life more than business success, a la Tesla.
My interpretation of Levandowski, is that he is pitching the current waymo strategy, to get as many retrofitted vehicles on the road in the target market and collect a ton of training data. These human driven "self-driving" cars could pick up passengers while collecting the data so as to build up a customer base and service flow for the future service.
I guess at least they haven't killed an innocent pedestrian with their self driving, like Uber.
2. Trusted tester program opened up to San Francisco residents for rides with a safety driver. Approved for commercial service (with a safety driver for now) by CA DMV.
Seems like they've made progress exactly like what Levandowski would have wanted.
Capitalism, and the stock market, on the other hand, doesn't appreciate it. It kills "cautious" companies and keeps alive companies that have a revenue model, even if that revenue model comes at the expense of safety.
So, it says about capitalism that few customers actually care about safety when they do their buying decisions (the market then delivers according to these chosen priorities); customers rather complain when their conscious buying decisions turn out to be bad ideas (instead of accepting these as consequences of their buying decisions).
https://slate.com/technology/2021/09/covid-rapid-antigen-tes...
Your sample size is way too small to be implying that FSD is safe - given a year or so, with millions more miles, we'll see what the score is.
By the way, and this is anecdotal, I was personally given a FSD demonstration a few weeks ago. The car immediately did an unsafe lane change in the middle of an intersection. Albeit, that was one of the pilot program beta versions.
Compare Tesla’s initial approach (or lack thereof) to driver monitoring vs GM Super Cruise for instance.
Quick Edit: I suppose it's more accurate to say FSD hasn't killed anyone, but AP has, but given the current context, I'm not sure it's relevant.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/25/tes...
Because if you Google "How many people have died because of Tesla FSD" it seems to be at least 10 according to tesladeaths.com . I also found a strange case of 2 deaths in Texas with no one in the driver's seat a few months ago.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-...
Reuters reports about 10 Tesla fatalities directly attributable to Autopilot:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-saf...
30,000 Americans (and vastly more people worldwide) die each year from human-driving mistakes... let's not ignore the ongoing human cost of the status quo. Self-driving has the potential to cut that human toll to almost zero. We should not trap ourselves in a future where 1 self-driving mistake death is considered worse than a hundred thousand deaths from normal human mistakes.
If one death is caused by Tesla's FSD should we ignore the fact that statistically it would have already saved x lives?
Somehow that case only looks "very strong" to people with a financial interest in the tech.
Death by shared responsibility is well accepted. It’s about agency and consent.
If you rescued a group of 30 drowning people with your yacht. No one thinks you can shoot one or two on the head, on a whim, and argue that it’s okay— based on the fact that your actions led to a net saving of 28 lives.
So, how you die matters. We human drivers are all out there making a reasonable effort to avoid accidents. The standard self-driving tech must be held to is also “reasonableness.” None of the deaths due to self-driving cars I have heard of can meet that standard. They are unacceptable.
Uber had one fatality and is now out of the market. The public has very little stomach for error here. Multiple companies with multiple fatalities could shelve the whole industry indefinitely.
How does your solution spread to millions of drivers? I think if you actually want to start saving lives now (and not decades from now for FSD + policy change + phasing out), mandate real driving classes and tests for licensing.
And I'm skeptical how much good you do. Yes, younger drivers are less safe, but I'm unconvinced that simply having some more instruction time and a test that is more rigorous but presumably not onerous really provides the equivalent of a few years of experience.
Of course that’s valuing everyone’s lives equally, there are some arguments to be made that slight improvements aren’t enough.
Unproven claim.
I am not saying it’s as good on average and clearly it’s much worse at some things. That said it’s not say ten times as likely to result in a fatal accident.
Unless you have some evidence why there isn’t a huge story around Autopilots overall safety?
That’s a very clear indication for near parity.
> Direct Line said it was too early to say whether the use of the autopilot system produced a safety record that justified lower premiums. It said it was charging less to encourage use of the system and aid research.
That was back in 2017 and they probably have better numbers now, but it's not exactly an indication of autonomy and being safer-than-humans. These sorts of discounts are also widely available for other ADAS systems.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-direct-line-ins-tesla-idU...
And again I am not using it as evidence that Autopilot is better, just that it’s within the same ballpark as human drivers. Offering a significant discount bounds how bad autopilot can be.
On the other hand if you’re keeping rural roads then self driving cars could make a huge difference even if cities banned cars.
Not it is not. It's on parity with human drivers IN IDEAL CONDITIONS. Autopilot is frequently flummoxed by rain, snow, or other high glare conditions.
It's kind of cheeky for these companies to claim their driver assist technologies have a better record than humans when they get to disengage every time the conditions are less than ideal. Humans don't have that option.
Hell, I could claim I'm an expert at anything as long as I get to tap out once I'm in over my head...
So, that doesn’t actually change the near parity question much. Further, the question isn’t if the 100% self driving is available today for all roads and weather conditions, the question when is it good enough to start saving lives.