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Comment by walkhour | Hacker News Reader

Driving is already a Russian roulette right? If autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers as advertised the barrel would just have more capacity.

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Car accidents kill someone every 100 million miles driven in the US.

Anyone claiming they're safer now is either selling something or doesn't know what they're talking about.

Could you share how many accidents happen, rather than deaths? With a source as well, if you happen to be looking it up.

Would you use an autonomous car if the death rate increases but accident rate decreases?

I figure deaths per million miles is a good stat

Most people choose to use cars despite that increasing both death rate and accident rate.

>Most people choose to use cars despite that increasing both death rate and accident rate.

In most of the US (not where I live, thankfully) the "choice" is use a car or stay home.

Not much of a choice.

Sure, the fact that people choose the more appealing option doesn't mean there wasn't a choice. That's just what people do when they have multiple options: they choose the one that's best according to whatever their criteria are. And many people might make a similar choice to reclaim multiple hours per day of driving time to do other things (like sleep, work, relax, etc.) while their car drives itself.

Absolutely.

Go and move to West Memphis, TN (or, as I said, with most places in the US) and try to live without a car.

Not really a choice. Which is why I live in a place with halfway-decent (well, the best in the US anyway) public transport.

Again, it is a choice, and the fact that you choose the better option doesn't mean it's not a choice.

>Again, it is a choice, and the fact that you choose the better option doesn't mean it's not a choice.

What's the choice? I don't have any idea what you mean

The choice is to stay at home, where you are very unlikely to get in a car accident, or to drive a car, which greatly increased the risk of accident and death.

>The choice is to stay at home, where you are very unlikely to get in a car accident, or to drive a car, which greatly increased the risk of accident and death.

Absolutely. At least until you're fired from your job because you don't show up. Then you'll (depending on where you live) a few months to maintain that "choice" before the landlord throws you out on your ass because you "chose" not to go to work.

Please.

Yet for many people, where they live isnt a choice, or their method of transport. Most of the US undeniably has poor public transport, and the only realistic means of travel for a day to day work schedule is via automobile.

Not sure if you were asking seriously, but: personally, yes.

This isn't that hard. Let's say loss of quality-adjusted life years due to accidents or something.

Being safer now is not a necessary claim to support the above (whether or not it's true). We don't ban student drivers from the roads.

Anyone claiming they are safer now.. vs what? Getting into a Tesla, turning on fsd and taking a snooze? Wonder how many millions of miles that would last without a fatality or car wreck. A lot less than 1 million I wager.

Depends a lot on what kind of road you're on.

Interstate highway? I'd absolutely trust it to cross the country while I napped.

Downtown urban cores where I can expect bicyclists in the road and delivery trucks parked in a lane? Not a chance.

Anywhere that involves making an unprotected left turn? Gambling with your life, there.

Statistical equivalence is one thing, but the risk will shift within the population. Let’s set the bar a bit higher than above average? The average driver is a dumbass. autonomous vehicles should be expected to consistently make better decisions than the best drivers, not just the average ones.

Why is beating the existing standard not enough?

Presumably, if a specific person is a very good driver, entering an automated vehicle that is merely better than average driver, with no controls to interject, results in a net reduction of safety for this individual.

More specifically, what IF or rather WHEN there is an incident that could've been prevented by human interjection, but wasn't?

Other aspect is, why are we only ever discussing these separately? What is the safety of a automation-assisted human? Can we get to the point where safety is better than either system alone?

> Presumably, if a specific person is a very good driver, entering an automated vehicle that is merely better than average driver, with no controls to interject, results in a net reduction of safety for this individual.

But for far more individuals there will be a net increase in safety, moreover, since traffic accidents don't only imperil drivers, pedestrians and safe drivers will also experience an increase in safety due to average drivers using just-above-average automation.

> What is the safety of a automation-assisted human?

That's where we're at today with systems like Tesla's Autopilot.

We will. For consumers like you there will be a $100k option to increase safety by adding sensors/compute power or something else on top of a base model. But the ultimate game here is to free people from the need to drive cars for a living or pay someone to do so. This will also open a lot of other optimisations to human life, which exist now due to cost of human labor. If human stays in the car - this mission is failed. + It's not like if you are the most careful driver you are safe - if a drunk no-licensed jerk aims for your car - you are dead due to his lack of driving ability, not yours.

It doesn't beat the existing standard.

You wrote correctly "should". Today they can't even compete with the average driver, regardless of what the companies tell us that try to benefit from them.

I would be perfectly happy if we had automatic drivers that were as good as the average human driver, since I already integrated and accepted that risk and accept it every time I drive. Why raise the bar for a new technology if that risks preventing it from being widely deployed and relentlessly improved?

I would probably accept technology that's as good as the median driver.

how about one standard deviation about the mean? (sorry, I'm an unrepentant mean over median person)

It was a bit tongue-in-cheek - the median driver has precisely zero accidents in any given year.

I don't really know how to think about it. Accident rate, on a per-mile basis, falls out of some combination of "hardness of the driving problem" (freeways have many fewer accidents than city streets, I think) as well as propensity to take risks (driving at night; in bad weather; at higher speeds; while distracted) as well as driving skill.

What, by definition, people will accept is an accident rate similar to that for professional drivers; e.g. taxi/rideshare/livery. According to a report by Uber, that's about half the number of fatal accidents on a VMT basis versus the general population in their case.

I believe the median driver has N/M accidents a year, where N is the number of accidents, and M is the number of people, right? Well, no, I that's true of the mean, but not the median.

This is bullshit.

Reduction of average statistical risk is what really matters and will be what is primarily responsible for driving down real world fatalities and life altering injuries.

I for one am not going to stand back and let fear of new technology and unfounded preference for human driven action over automation stand in the way of making a statistical impact on reducing the 1.35 million auto fatalities that happen globally every year. To propose that possibly reducing that number to 1.30 million is not good enough and we have to hold back rollout until the tech is better than the "best driver" is disgustingly sociopathic.

It’s easy to say that from a statistical standpoint. I’m sure if you were a victim in one of these less-likely accidents at the hands of faulty autonomous tech you would not be so adamant. Forcing this technology onto people sounds a lot like fascism.

No one is forcing anything on anyone.

Just don't stand in the way of people who choose to use self driving cars because you're more afraid of it that of extremely lethal and incompetent human drivers.

Self driving cars will be as safe as the level of criminal liability faced by the makers.

Regulatory capture means it wont be high and the potential profits to be realized from first mover advantage here means there will be a significant incentive to "move fast and break things".

So to speak.

I'd feel safe if an executive who OKs a software update that kills someone risks significant jail time. If that means no self driving cars for 20 more years then I am totally fine with that. That would simply mean that they werent safer as promised.

I agree that there is a significant monetary incentive to "move fast and kill people". In the end, paying out a few $MM to random families is financially minimal compared to the $BBB that are up for grabs. We will never really have executives going to jail for things like this. We've built a system of profits > anything else.

This has been the status quo for the whole car industry for decades.

If executives were jailed for car accidents people we would have trains and trams in every corner.

Ordinary cars are testable, we understands quality of merials, corrosion, etc.

When it comes to AI droving, noone has a fucking clue what it will do in next 50 milliseconds. Teslas literally mis-classified a semi trailer for an underpass

The opportunity for shenanighans is endless

... and if makers of kitchen implements were jailed for knife accidents/crime then we'd be eating soup with plastic spoons for every meal.

It doesn't make sense to have universal product liability in that way: there are too many creative idiots.

In terms of complexity and security features a car is much closer to an airplane than a knife.

It's very disingenuous to compare it to a knife.

Not really; the fact is that sharp objects and heavy objects moving at speed are both inherently hazardous because of the basic nature of the physical world, but those same attributes make them extremely useful.

I don't object at all to holding manufacturers accountable for defective products; but it makes no sense to say "if your product is involved in an accident, you go to jail", which was the premise of the comment to which I responded.

> Not really

Citation needed.

> was the premise of the comment to which I responded.

It clearly wasn't.

As if automakers haven't found plenty of ways to make human-piloted cars less safe in exchange for profit.

> I'd feel safe if an executive who OKs a software update that kills someone risks significant jail time. If that means no self driving cars for 20 more years then I am totally fine with that.

The status quo is 139 people dying every day in the US in traffic accidents.

If we replaced all cars with self-driving ones, an executive could approve a software update every single day that kills only 100 and it could very well still be a net benefit to society.

These discussions always seem to implicitly presume that we're currently at zero deaths. We're not--we just don't hear about them. Every year we delay self driving cars is more people dying, not fewer.

>These discussions always seem to implicitly presume that we're currently at zero deaths.

I never presumed that and never would.

I do presume that if we watered down criminal liability for reckless driving then we'd get way, way more than 139.

The current regulatory framework surrounding self driving cars is rather like making drink driving subject to a $30 fine. I would be surprised if it starts out safer than humans.

I'm assuming a couple things here, but

1. isn't a steering wheel the only plausible failsafe control for somebody supervising these experimental machines? Not sure what other control interface would be better in life-or-death instants/moments, plus any driver can carry over their preexisting skills in that situation. If better emergency controls than steering wheels exist, fine, I guess.

2. Isn't the question not

    safety(autonomous vehicle) > safety(human driver)

but rather

    safety(autonomous vehicle + human control fail-safe) > safety(autonomous vehicle alone)

Just don't understand why, on the face of it, the law is being changed in a way that I guess to me personally implies trials without common-sense-interface human intervention controls is legal?

Define 'safer'.

If you have not paid your taxes, get in to your car, and it drives you to the local court-house or police station, this is a new risk, no?

Considering the people least likely to pay their taxes are those who could afford them easiest I would be all for that.

I was thinking in terms of casualties per miles driven. Agreed that this definition doesn't capture all the danger.

Casualties per miles driven is a terrible stat for current self-driving technology because as it stands, it forces drivers to take over in the most dangerous situations. And you can't generalize for all miles in cars capable of self-driving because the population who own cars like that are not representative of the average. It's a very tricky thing to accurately measure whether it's safer for an individual to drive themselves or let the car do it for them.

It would be actually be better for the car to drive itself to the repo man, if you miss payments on it / are refusing to pay your debts to the government.

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