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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

The bet says within cities, and humans struggle with those sorts of extreme conditions too. Natural disasters and emergencies are excepted. I suppose it just needs to do approximately as well as a human.

I'm with Jeff, self driving cars have been just a few years away for well over a decade now. I think it's one of those cases where the last 10% of the problem takes 90% of the effort. If we built cities and the road infrastructure around self driving capability that might work, but currently cities aren't built that way and that wouldn't meet the definition of Level 5 anyway.

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> I suppose it just needs to do approximately as well as a human.

I think that's a fallacy. We allow humans to injure and kill each other in "accidents" with limited liability because we are human; I can't be expected to 100% reliably decide in a fraction of a second what to do when a car cuts me off, so if I hit it, or avoid it and hit another vehicle or pedestrian, I don't go to jail.

But a computer can be expected to make that decision fast enough; if it can't, it's because the designers or programmers made errors that the manufacturer missed because they rationally calculated they were not worth catching or fixing.

There's some level of safe driving it's unreasonable to expect from self-driving cars – but it's not the same level as humans.

> But a computer can be expected to make that decision fast enough

I don't think this expectation is reasonable. It makes sense only if you conceive of humans as flawed computers. But certainly it is an expectation people have, including a large segment (if not majority) of HN readers, and this expectation is absolutely slowing development and adoption of the technology.

> I suppose it just needs to do approximately as well as a human.

From a practical/logical sense this is true, but I'm not sure it would work out that way. People would never accept FSD cars with accident/injury rates comparable with humans. FSD would have to be at least 10x better than human drivers, maybe more. Psychologically we are much more risk averse to when not in control. It's why people are afraid of elevators but not stairs, despite a 50x difference in safety.

Historically computers go from "barely able to do X", to "better than any human could ever be" very quickly. I'm with Carmack on this bet.

The more inserting thing to me is will people accept FSD cars that tell them "no"? For example, we're about to get freezing sleet here, and a FSD car may very well decide "this is an impossible situation to drive safely" and refuse to move.

And it may very well be right; most people way overestimate how good they are at driving in very adverse conditions.

And what about when "Mom is in the backseat having a heart attack and we need to try to get to the hospital" is added to the equation?

A “ambulance mode” could be added (and in fact might be nice once enough cars are FSD and can get out of the way).

We already have things like this “what if I had a beer and need to drive mom to the hospital” say those with a enforced breathalyzer.

You can probably manage to have 10x less chance of a serious accident than the average human by being sober, calm, attentive and caring about braking distances anyway. "Approximately as well as a human", measured by a pool of human accidents dominated by serious driver failings is a pretty low bar.

Elon said in a recent interview with Lex Friedman that they aren't shoot for 10x better than human drivers anymore.

They are hoping to be 2x or 3x as good, and the amount of lives saved by that should be enough to influence lawmakers and the public.

> The bet says within cities

Cities have fast roads too.

> humans struggle with those sorts of extreme conditions too

People drive in a wide range of weathers. If you need to check the weather in a major city every day to see if your will drive itself, your car is not self driving (IMO). If that weather happens more than 5-10% of days every year, that’s not an “extreme condition”.

That's what I'm thinking would be required, infrastructure changes and not solely 100% onboard technology. 8 years is not enough time for cities to plan for and build enough of that infrastructure (not to mention, what to build?) for an automaker to commit to a level 5 car when they are already struggling with L3.

If you want to see a city-based stress test, I'd like to see "drive from JFK to EWR at 4pm on a Friday".

Not a fun drive, but via Staten Island would be all highways, no?

Yeah, that's too easy. Add "via the Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel".

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