The amount of cases we charge people for accidents is extremely rare because in most cases its an actual accident. People swerving into oncoming traffic, not checking both sides before making a turn...etc.
And if someone wanted to intentionally murder someone, seems like a perfect excuse "the car did it".
Unless we are going to victim blame.
So here you are saying, "Hey, we have this great system that is such a better diver than the human. Here are the statistics that show it." and then turning around and saying "Hey human, why were you not a better driver. You need to be paying attention."
A bit of wanting to have your cake and eat it too, isn't it?
GP is talking about insurance and how we regulate drivers, stating that we should be looking at the same for autopilot systems.
Parent says "Always prosecute the driver. There's no such thing as "the car did it"."
At what point does the "autopilot" have any skin in the game so to speak? Is it a binary thing, one day we wake up to an update and the cars can drive themselves with no input?
Or will will be forever stuck in a quasi beta test, where the driver is liable for the actions of the system but has no meaningful way for controlling the system(autopilot) or even knowing how the system operates.
You can't have it both ways. Either the system is better than people and is going to take responsibility or it isn't. No one will accept a system they have no control over and do not understand but have to accept liability for.
Today is not that day. Nor is it next year. Or this decade.
A whole lot of people are going to die this decade, both drivers and victims hit, because marketing wants people to believe you don't have to pay attention once you turn it on rather it's an assist, not a replacement, for the driver.
It's not autopilot right now. It's driver assist. As long as the driver exists, the driver is responsible.
In an "old school" car, if an accelerator gets stuck and you mow someone down, then they find spaghetti code in the accelerator or it mechanically got stuck from design failure, you still have liability for killing someone but your prosecution won't be the same as someone who purposely drove over someone they were angry with.
GP is talking about holding Tesla responsible the same way we do with drivers ala insurance and regulation
Parent says to only hold driver responsible
So while the parent did not mention autopilot per se, the comment can only be interpreted in the context of talking about autopilot/ like systems. Otherwise, "Always prosecute the driver." does not make sense. That is the only option when you are talking about standard accident investigations(baring manufacturer defects e.g. faulty ignition switch, rollover/tires, sticky/abnormal acceleration pedals), nothing else in a standard car has ahem autonomy.
And Tesla has explicitly advertised that this Waymo scenario is where they're headed, so it's a question that's definitely worth thinking about now. "Blame the driver" isn't looking like a tenable position long term.
No, not at all. The average driver is 1/3 distracted and 1/4 drunk. Autopilot and similar systems must be at least as good as a skilled, attentive, unimpaired driver.
> Is the only way we will accept something like autopilot is if it has a perfect driving record?
Putting it plainly, this is bullshit. No one -- no one at all -- is asking for autopilot to be perfect. People are asking for it not to drive full-speed into obvious obstacles.
Kinda curious where you are getting those numbers from.
But isn't this a weird criterion? An obvious obstacle for a human might not be obvious to the computer -- but importantly, it could be the other way around too: the computer detects obstacles that are obvious to it, but a human would miss.
Shouldn't the goal be that the computer considers more obstacles obvious than the human?
I get the emotional argument that it's hard to convince a person off the street of this, but isn't HN a place for more nuanced debate?
> Shouldn't the goal be that the computer considers more obstacles obvious than the human?
That would be excellent, as long as it's correct :)
It seems to me the point is that an automated driver is never distracted and never drunk. The automated systems should get credit for that. That is, they should not necessarily be compared to a skilled, attentive, unimpaired driver. That is, as you admit, not the current state of affairs. Relative to the status quo, automated driving is becoming much safer.
... dealing with motorcycles.
I don't care if it's 25% better than the public for non-motorcycles if it's an AI-powered cager.
It's frankly a little baffling that this part of human psychology even has to be explained. It's like the trolley problem: There seem to be some people who don't understand why you wouldn't simply pursue the result that holds fewer deaths - who don't understand why the trolley problem exists at all, what the point of it is. I suspect there is a relationship between these people and the people who don't understand how there could be any part of decision-making about autonomous vehicles apart from the raw numeric value of deaths vs non-autonomous vehicles.
Cancer is cured but 99% of its death toll is replaced by wholly random spontaneous human combustion. Is that better?
What if it wasn't purely random but instead the chance of your spontaneous combustion slightly depended on if your socks are worn? Is that better?
I posit both suck.
Side note, imagine if you got bulldozed by a Tesla and died only to have someone write this comment. I know we live in a huge world and we can't think of everyone this way, but there should be a modicum of compassion for the guy who just died. His life has ended for what amounts to a potential programming error. It doesn't matter if another human could do it to. This man is actually dead. It's tragic.
Society is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR more risk adverse which IMO is holding us back, we can not advance because perfection is impossible
If one driver hits a bicyclist at a stop sign, we can assign the blame to the driver and figure out the cause i.e. driver inattentive, lack of reflective gear on bicycle. We can then take steps to mitigate this, driver education, requiring lights on bicycles.
If an automated system hits a bicycle at a stop sign, we can try and do the same analysis but my understanding is, we have to interpret the data and might not actually discover the root cause, in which case we have no way of mitigating the failure. Add in the fact that the explanation is difficult or does not make sense to the general public(i.e. the body of the trailer was white and contrasted with the sky as the car went up the hill(public: anyone can see the difference between a trailer and the sky!))
We understand how and why people fail, we can empathize with them and assign blame to them. We don't understand how the computer is failing and can neither empathize with them nor are we actually assigning blame to them(This system is in beta; You must have you hands on the wheel at all time and be ready to take over; X is not liable for any damage caused by use of this system, the user assumes full liability etc.)
You are correct that we should probably be thinking even more about it, and other countries are doing that, slowing down cars, providing separation from other modes of transport and pedestrians, and reducing car dependence altogether.