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Comment by bottled_poe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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