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Comment by allears | Hacker News Reader

Cars should not be in the business of deciding who can or cannot drive them. Period. What if I've had a few drinks, and my companion all of a sudden has a serious accident or illness and needs to be driven to the hospital? How would you weigh my somewhat greater probability of having a driving mishap against my companion's serious and immediate need for treatment?

I'm sure other similar scenarios could be imagined. This is a wrong-headed application of nanny technology.

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I agree, and my state's criminal code even specificies that "Necessity" is a legal defense.

> A defense that permits a person to act in a criminal manner when an emergency situation, not of the person's own creation compels the person to act in a criminal manner to avoid greater harm from occurring.

https://lawshelf.com/coursewarecontentview/necessity-and-dur...

Just like fair use, these kinds of rights will disappear once enforcement is automated.

Add an emergency button that self reports to the next PD. The hazard lights turn on. You can drive now, explain later. You'll be given the benefit of the doubt, though if it happens three Saturdays in a row, that's a bit odd.

It's also not illegal to drive drunk in many jurisdictions. It's illegal to do so while on public roads (or roads accessible by the public).

Which means you'll need to add the lack of perfect geofencing to the list of potential failure modes.

What’s the mileage driven on private roads vs public roads?

All scenarios can be imagined. But you need to look at actual probability of these scenarios. For one person saved by driving drunk thousands must be killed by drunk driving.

The scenario that tends to be omitted from the deliberations is the scenario where 100 % of cars get an alco-lock, even though 95 % of the drivers have never driven drunk, but the manufacturer of the alco-lock has a nice racket producing them. Even more if some kind of certification is needed and only the Senator's cousin's firm was somehow able to be certificated in Sleepy Hollow state.

The quest for security is potentially endless and endlessly expensive.

Sure, same with seatbelts. Barely any people ever need them. Yet you have to manufacture and install them in all cars. What a racket.

If the problem is nepotism, fix nepotism.

I think your comparison is off. First, I believe seatbelts are relatively straightforward to manufacture, and so no one small company is likely to make a profit from their manufacturing in a monopolistic anti-competitive manner, hence no racket. Compare to breathalyzers, which are more complex and require complex certification which would likely be gamed by the senator and family member.

Nobody is complaining of nepotism around child safety seals on medication.

> Nobody is complaining of nepotism around child safety seals on medication.

If there's nepotism there then people should complain. Not about the seals. Just nepotism.

> Compare to breathalyzers, which are more complex and require complex certification ...

Sure. That's we don't have them yet. But if you could detect drunk driver with few dollars worth of camera and chip running some NN. Then ballance would change.

1. Not wearing seatbelts won't render your car inoperative. (At least in the older cars I know. Maybe it already will...)

2. You can become participant of an accident even if you are an attentive, careful driver, through no fault of your own. But you cannot accidentally drink and drive. People who do that act deliberately criminally. I admit that this is just my opinion, but we shouldn't treat everyone as a potential reckless criminal by law. This kind of insulting paranoia coupled with governmental power breeds nightmares in the long run.

I think those laws are designed for places with working emergency services. If there is an emergency, call an ambulance. Don't drive drunk.

Yes, sometimes ambulances are not very convenient - but if I had a choice of a person having to waste a few hours because ambulance took them to wrong hospital vs them driving quickly while drunk and nervous, I would choose former. I am sorry, your convinience is not worth the extra risks to bystanders.

Which is just bad policy, not everywhere is urban. Even in an urban area with generally good emergency services that is not a guarantee 100% of the time. For instance some reason 911 could be down. Ambulances could be short if there is some other event is going on that is occupying them all or made them not operational. There are numerous examples of things happening like this in cities where normally they are operational.

A vehicle that has the potential to not operate either due to false positive or not handling a legal exception that a lot states have on their books. Is not a vehicle you want to rely on for emergencies. It even becomes more risky if one lives in area that does not have responsive emergencies services.

This is even before we consider possible privacy issues and concerns depending on how this is implemented. Let alone legal and moral considerations of essentially monitoring and scanning of people who have not committed a crime to try and prevent some people from breaking the law.

Laws should always take into account a possibility of a non-standard situation. No one on Earth is exempt from hard to predict crises.

For example, even in places where emergency services are usually good, Covid peaks strained their capacities quite seriously.

The same can happen during a mass casualty event. If a plane crashes with a lot of survivors, there may not be an ambulance available for your spouse who just went down with a heart attack.

Drunk driving is not _that_ dangerous. Even at quite a high BAC level you end up around 10-100x more likely to have an accident. I believe that, at least in terms of personal risk, unless you're ten drinks in it's more dangerous to ride a motorcycle sober.

It's restricted because in aggregate or when done repeatedly it would be a disaster (particularly when drunk driver A interacts with drunk driver B), not because doing it once in an emergency would be problematic.

Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433627/

(at 0.08% BAC fatal accident risk is 13x - what's the risk of waiting ten minutes for an ambulance if your friend is dying?)

This logic kind of reminds me one I heard where someone argumented why he needs a gun. It was because if his child is sick he thinks he should have his gun so he can hijack the plane to fly his kid to the place where he can be treated.

a lot of leaps and equivalencies being made there that weaken the comparison.

Training for driving a car is common place, use of force and threat of violence, aviation disasters are many times larger scale than automotive accidents, cars have a fairly limited passenger capacity compared to certain aviation options , list goes on.

I don't think that the message is "any and all means must be executed", but rather that gambles being made for the judged 'greater good' should be a human faculty rather than an automated decision making process that has taken the human factor out of the question completely.

I don't see any quivalence. It just reminded me of that argumentations. By being far fetched, emotionally appealing story (even to me), which is completely insane when you look at the problem and claims rationally.

> I don't think that the message is "any and all means must be executed", but rather that gambles being made for the judged 'greater good' should be a human faculty rather than an automated decision making process that has taken the human factor out of the question completely.

Preventing people wholesale from taking some gambles is a decission made by human faculty on the basis of statistics. Technology just enforces that decission.

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