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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

> I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment.

You’re basically an non-consenting tester for every piece of innovation that society every has/ever will come up with, in one way or another. It’s an unavoidable feature of living on the same planet as 8 billion other people. Perhaps the safety of this technology does need to improve, or perhaps not. But there’s no level of improvement that would ever be able to satisfy this outrage you’ve expressed at something new existing in the same place as you.

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> You’re basically an non-consenting tester for every piece of innovation that society every has/ever will come up with, in one way or another. It’s an unavoidable feature of living on the same planet as 8 billion other people. Perhaps the safety of this technology does need to improve, or perhaps not. But there’s no level of improvement that would ever be able to satisfy this outrage you’ve expressed at something new existing in the same place as you.

Why do you say it's unavoidable? Regulations could certainly keep these tests off of public roads.

They are speaking more broadly. Every day you walk past buildings with novel construction features, planes fly overhead without your permission, the ingredients to the food you eat change without your knowledge or consent.

It's a simple fact of life that you test things without explicitly consenting. The driverless cars are no different.

Food ingredients are posted on the package. If the contents differ the manufacturer is liable.

Let’s say autonomous cars, once fully implemented, are even 10% safer than existing drivers. And testing in real-world conditions, speeds up the implementation by even just a year. We would need about 3k deaths at the hands of the autonomous drivers before the trade off was no longer worth it. This is only considering the US. And based on very conservative estimates of 10% improvement and a reduction of only a year savings in time to deploy. The more likely scenario will put that number in the 10s of thousands in my opinion.

Personally, I would much rather we slowly develop and deploy these cars in the wild rather than continue testing in some controlled environments. At least this way we can monitor progress and judge their readiness as a society. Plus, the sooner they happen, the better for everyone.

You're trying to do math in a scenario where you have no real numbers. Of course you can pull some stuff out of your butt (+10%, 1 year) to say it's going to save lives but unless you can justify those numbers it's meaningless.

No fucking way? I thought my math was rock-solid!

The point is not the exact numbers. It’s to demonstrate that even if we do suffer accidents and deaths from testing self-driving cars on the road, the end result will be many more saved lives (just based on the fact of how many people die from traffic accidents today) Of course this hinges on many other factors to be true, but that’s the case with all kinds of technological advances.

And they did, until they didn't. This is not a brand new, unproven technology. It's been developing for over a decade. The car didn't hurt anyone or crash into anything - it simply did not have its lights on. The behavior to drive to a safer place for the traffic stop was intentional, per Cruise. This is something human drivers do as well. When being pulled over, it's common to pull into a parking lot or other nearby place that isn't in the driving path, for the officer's safety and convenience, in addition to allowing traffic to continue to flow without obstruction.

What about those pesky horseless carriages? Definitely should have had regulations to keep them off the roads. /sarcasm

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