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Comment by mysore | Hacker News Reader

self driving cars could save the world from millions of deaths per year and reduce stress and wasted time from sitting in traffic in cities like LA/NYC

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Interestingly, I thought like you some years ago. But since then, I realized that, nah, we just need to make cities that don't require cars at all.

I'm not against self driving cars, they'll totally save millions of lives. But we must not make the mistake to build our society around the fact that self driving cars are a thing. We must build our future around the fact that any city should be livable without a car.

This. Coming from the rust belt, NYC was shock and awe for me and it isn't even a good example. But I get a bunch of people who ask me "How do you park when you visit?!" I don't...in town. I get a PATH train in NJ and forget the car. It is freeing and the Subway system works well enough for anyone. I wish I didn't live in a Stroad hellscape.

Some of us (maybe most of us) don't want to live in a human Habitrail like NYC.

Still, you can live without cars outside NYC.

I’m currently living in the French countryside in a 3k people village. I do have a car but I barely need it on a daily basis : I WFH or take the 20 min train to my office (currently writing from my train running at 160kmh - 99MPH) and I have a grocery shop at 5 min of walk from my home.

I do have "luck" (well, it’s not really luck since I choose to live there) because even in France/Europe, it’s far from the norm.

But it’s possible and working solutions exists all over the world, just waiting to be copied.

I came to the conclusion myself. So, yeah, the primary goal should be to make communities that do not require cars at all...but the second-best thing i think we can do is to take the humans out of the control of cars for communities that already built. (Obviously, as we change even the established communities, any changes should shift towards a place without the need for cars too.)

I think it's important to acknowledge that not everyone wants to live a life that doesn't require a car. A car is a surrogate for other problems, like poor city planning and bad public transit, but even in the best of cases, it's a perfectly valid desire to be removed from urban centers and living and being willing to transport in to those areas when needed.

It's a solution to a problem, but said problem is not the root cause. Reduce the need for driving in the first place; normalize public transit within city limits, improve city designs by putting shops and work closer by, redesign cities to be more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly (and I'm aware cyclists get plenty of accidents too, I live in a cyclist country), etc. These are not easy things to fix, because especially in the US where I believe this is about, cities aren't designed like this in the first place and can't be redone easily.

First, if drivers make mistake, make them more accountable; require better training, enforce laws more strictly, etc. What are the causes behind traffic accidents? I'm confident the majority is from reckless driving, disregarding other drivers, speeding, impatience, alcohol / drugs, etc. Another percentage will be from unsafe driving conditions, which self-driving cars won't fix because they'll refuse to work in those conditions.

I think you're spot on. Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about.

> Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about.

I remember this being said as far as a decade ago, and still, Teslas from 2022 are emergency braking on the highway.

At scale safety is just a numbers game. A car model could be 10x as safe as human drivers and still occasionally drive directly into oncoming traffic.

Tesla isn’t anywhere close to that, but self driving cars have no reason to get worse. Systems good enough for fully self driving taxi services are already on the road and the the software is steadily getting better.

I know that Tesla's FSD is already safer than human drivers. But the society is not ready for children dying because of an erroneous data point in the training model that we can't even debug, let alone fix it.

There are some real positives to self-driving cars, but the negatives concern me far more.

A lot of people who have great trust in the system probably won't see this as an issue until its too late, but one of the things that greatly concerns me about this notion of self-driving cars is its possible negative impact on human freedom.

To some extent, a car represents freedom because its a tool that lets you go anywhere you want to go without requesting permission from anybody. Particularly for cars with internal combustion engines, the ability to quickly fuel up and travel anywhere affords you some measure of control over your life and choices, particularly in an emergency.

A car that's run on software is effectively no longer yours and cannot be relied on as a tool to ensure control over your own fate. And electric cars (at least current versions) cannot quickly be refueled in the same way.

A corporation decides to demand extra payments for some software that lets you travel on highways? What can you do about it when your new car is maxed out the wazoo with DRM?

Government decides that it doesn't want its subjects to travel too far? Software update refuses to take you anywhere besides approved destinations and alerts authorities. This is no longer dystopian speculation or some distant past authoritarian experience: we've seen in modern western democratic countries in very recent experience that it was made illegal to travel too far from your house.

I love a lot of the tech behind Teslas and electric cars, but I don't trust the scenario where my car can be manipulated entirely by software and there's no absolute fully physical manual override that ensures a human can control it.

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