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Comment by Nomentatus | Hacker News Reader

They do "fall off the edge of the world" a lot; but so do human neural networks; I've seen a bad crash as a result of a human simply pulling out of a driveway right in front of a motorcycle, 'cause they're rare. She had tagged the motorcycle as a bike while it was farther away, then boom. Her interpolation (while checking the other side) didn't work, and her averaging over uncertainty didn't work either because motorcycles are rather rare up north, they aren't the average vehicle. I've made a similar error re a kid on a wall (he suddenly jumped directly into the bikepath) but managed to avoid him (my bike zoomed to his left and I tumbled past his right. He wasn't hurt, although I got a severe wrist sprain from throwing the bike to the left.) As a driver I behave very differently around kids on walls, now. It was just an edge case I'd never encountered, and I didn't have enough data to calculate under uncertainty.

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I see surprisingly little discussion of overall statistics on safety of self drive vs humans, and what I do see is often self reported by companies or by equally potentially biased sources in the media. I’ve searched many times and a straightforward stat seems hard to find.

There's still too much apples and oranges for direct comparison. Tesla FSD doesn't make some of the mistakes human drivers do (like dozing off or being drunk) but it introduces new mistakes humans rarely make (like driving under semi trailers crossing the road).

It's certainly not straightforward. You know how 90% of crashes occur within whatever many miles of home? People don't use autopilot while they're cruising around their suburbs or cities.

Companies would have to disclose not just their accidents, but also how much driving is done in different places. Then all those places would have to be compared or at least categorized. Its complex enough that there would definitely not be a straightforward, obviously-correct way to interpret it all.

Since companies do not disclose where self-driving occurs, the whole thing is a complete nonstarter. It's whatever they choose to disclose.

This does spark a thought in me - at some point Telsa could create a proper test, with a portion of their drivers being asked to not use self-driving for a month, say. Or a free trial for a month that only half of Tesla users not already subscribed (randomly chosen) are eligible for.

There isnt really a way to gather the data free from a manufacturer, every current self-drive mode has limited operating scenarios, if you want to record an incident you first need the manufacturer to confirm that it was operating, and that it was one of the intended use cases.

Companies are less interested in safety vs a human to begin with, they have a emphasis on not causing any accident they are culpable for.

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