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Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures.

As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams. I don't think all the humans on earth ever stopped driving at the same time, though, so...that'll be a first :p

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> As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".

I have an issue with that argument, because it's typically being used together with highly disingenuous statistics (like Teslas our FSD has less accidents per mile than normal drivers) to give the impression that autonomous driving is anywhere close to being "better than people on average". This is just not the case at least not in any region with a broad variety of weather conditions.

> Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams.

Considering that most autonomous driving doesn't even work in really bad weather, I'd argue that humans are still much better despite the pileups.

> I have an issue with that argument, because it's typically being used together with highly disingenuous statistics

Agreed. I think the argument is ultimately true, but it's also easy to abuse with bad stats, and being skeptical of each new claim that we've "crossed the line" is a good idea.

Autonomous driving is stil in development.But it is getting better. in 5-10 years it is likely to be better than an average human driver.

I feel like people have been saying that for the last 5-10 years. What makes you believe the next 5-10 years will be any different?

> "This is just not the case"

Got any facts behind that assertion?

>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".

You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all.

You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

The bait and switch with this comparison is you're comparing something you have no control over (bread slicer which randomly malfunctions) against something you have full control over (my own cutting abilities). No one thinks their cutting ability is inferior, so of course they don't want to give up control, because they are (obviously) better than the average human.

If I posed the question as: Would you prefer to place your hand next to a machine which will accidentally cut your finger off once every 100,000 cuts, or a human chef that will accidentally cut your finger off every once every 50,000 cuts, which would you prefer?

I don't know about you, but I'd give the machine a crack.

Ok, maybe a different, well known example - the radiation Theraphy Therac-25 machines which would sometimes(extremely rarely) deliver a lethal dose of radiation instead of the one entered. Undoubtedly those machines saved more lives than they took, and also it's without question that they did so more accurately than any human operated machine could ever do. Yet they are considered one of the biggest failures of medical engineering ever.

I see it the same way - the current "self driving" systems shouldn't be allowed on the road, period, no matter how much safer they are than a statistical driver, unless they can be demonstrated to be completely 100% perfect in all scenarios(other than actual hardware failure - they shouldn't for instance run into a truck that's turning across a highway just because the system chose to ignore it).

Would I be incorrect to suppose that you don't use seatbelts?

I don't see why I wouldn't use them(or why would anyone), can you explain?

Yeah, I guess my comment was kind of off the cuff.

What I was thinking about, was that seatbelts are hardly "100% perfect in all scenarios." I mean, they can make it a more difficult to get out of a burning vehicle quickly, just as an example. Even ignoring the possibility of malfunction, or jamming and such, they're not perfect.

The fact is, even if seatbelts decrease your risk overall, they are nowhere near 100% perfect. Nevertheless, many of us choose to use seatbelts, and indeed even chose to do so before widespread legislation.

The statistics we have about self driving are kinda useless though. Teslas don't do intersections… which is where most accidents will happen. So yeah good they don't crash because they give up in the difficult situations.

the comparison is disingenuous, but yes, i absolutely would.

"sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers" sounds scary, but if it happens less often than people in the wild, this is absolutely a net gain.

> You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from here. Are old fashioned injuries with old fashioned knives preferable to newfangled injuries with newfangled equipment? It seems pretty straightforward to me that fewer injuries would be better, all else equal.

Maybe you're imagining all else will not be equal? Maybe the new injuries are more severe, or more likely to happen to innocent bystanders, or something like that. It could be. But I think it's important to be specific about what we're worried about here. Otherwise "fewer is fewer" is all we have to go on.

Yes, I absolutely would. I think a better question is would I want other people to use a bread slicer that chopped my fingers off on average less than they did with a manual version. You might think more highly of your own abilities, but raising the average is worthwhile even if not perfect.

I would if I thought I was worse than the average person at slicing bread. Wouldn't you?

> You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

And yet I have certainly seen bread slicers that are exactly like that. Possibly even worse than "other hand with knife". Maybe the analogy is also not very helpful though, because (at least for those bread slicers I'm thinking of) the user is still majorly in charge of his own safety, unlike FSD.

I am a pretty bad, easily distracted driver and it is actually one of the reasons why I stopped driving.

I would definitely use a robotaxi system that drives better than an average person. I already take taxis driven by someone else, which means that I take some risks anyway.

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