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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that’s the case- I don’t think there’s any evidence that self driving cars are better drivers than human drivers in real world conditions.

If this were only a human psychology problem, someone would just dump a fleet of self driving cars on the road and prove they have the tech. The rewards are too good to ignore and surpass any potential fine/regulation, if the tech is good enough.

But it’s not there yet, it might never get there. We’re so far off general AI it’s unreal, e.g. a human can drive a car with a single eye open, and one hand on the wheel, and another on a throttle- all from the drivers seat. Even with sensors and data coming in from all over the car, AI can’t manage it.

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I didn't take the parent to be saying that self-driving is better, just that humans are really surprisingly bad, and that's the bar we should be measuring against, not an ideal world where no one dies in traffic accidents.

The main ethical issue of 'deaths due to self-driving cars' is because of who being at fault?

If the car is self-driving, and truly self driving - no steering wheel, when it causes an accident, who is at fault?

Humans make mistakes, but humans also can change their response easily to a given input. Is Tesla at fault? Do we just issue them a fine for a person's life? Should the car do its best to preserve the life inside the vehicle, or the lives outside the vehicle? Automobiles do significant damage to pedestrians in regards to their dangerous design.

Surely corporations should be held to a higher standard than people, as they're not bound by the same restrictions a single person is.

I don't see how that's any different of an issue for when any machine malfunctions and kills someone. Was the design or manufacture of the machine negligent in some way? Was it a failure mode that we've decided is rare enough that no one is at fault?

Self-driving cars may be new, but deaths caused by machines are as old as machines.

Machines in a business setting when they cause death, often it is due to improper safety protocol for said machines.

Consumer devices don't have this level of control over a person's life anywhere near as often, in the sense that the device has your life at stake and makes decisions for you.

"no one is at fault" is entirely counter intuitive to engineering principles. When a rare accident happens, the engineer is often responsible.

We don't 'build' AI in anywhere remotely the same way as buildings or legacy software products, there isn't a 'designer' for said AI system other than the training model - which can certainly not account for every possible edge case.

Self-driving cars can't 'only be \better\ than humans'. Because only humans can currently drive. Self-driving cars need to be nearly 100% safe when you entirely remove the human driver.

When machines malfunction and kill people, the manufacturers pay. If it was gross negligence that killed someone, someone goes to jail, unless they're the dead one.

Every day, our homes don't catch fire despite all of the electricity running through the walls, our combustion engines don't explode, our batteries don't explode, our buildings don't collapse. The modern world is full of things that could kill us and don't.

I didn't say no one is at fault, the manufacture is at fault if they built the vehicle in a way that we deem was wrong enough to deserve fault.

And we get to decide who's liable, just because you can act like the AI is sentient doesn't mean you can't make the company who wrote the code responsible for the actions of the AI.

And if we wait until self-driving cars are 100% safe, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths will happen in the meanwhile.

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