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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

There's a very strong argument that the best way to save lives is whatever strategy advances self-driving technology the fastest.

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.

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The status quo is ridiculous, but we already have a better solution, dense cities and mass transit. We should be building trains using decades old tech, not AI bs. Of course I'm just shouting into the void but the dream of self driving cars is incredible over engineering and will take us backwards in the long run on the problem of global warming.

Its much easier to sell the future if you portrait it as "autonomous pods for everyone" instead of "trains everywhere", even though the latter is vastly more efficient, simpler, cheaper and eco-friendly. As usual, convenient ideas fare better than good ideas.

So in your analysis, how many people should robocars be killing? The easy answer is "anything less than 30K", right?

Somehow that case only looks "very strong" to people with a financial interest in the tech.

Unless you are a serial drunk driver you would want FSD to be alot safer then the human average.

Death by robocar is simply unacceptable.

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.

When you factor in the human element, getting on the road as soon as possible may not actually be that strategy.

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.

Wait, does everyone get a free Tesla with FSD at some point?

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.

So, if you make it more time-consuming and more expensive to get a license, essentially the entire burden is now put onto the less well-off segment of society.

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.

Exactly. Perfection is the enemy of progress.

If one death is caused by Tesla's FSD should we ignore the fact that statistically it would have already saved x lives?

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