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Comment by lynx23 | Hacker News Reader

You're hitting the nail spot on with this one for me. As a blind pedestrian, I very much feel I am in danger of falling into exactly that group of potential victims you are hinting at. Right now, I have the illusive comfort of the "Vertrauensgrundsaatz" which basically tells every driver obtaining a drivers licence that they need to take special care when it comes to disabled pedestrians. Sure, one might say these new self driving systems will "just" have to follow that same rule as well, but I am very much doubtful this is technically possible. So currently, I feel like the drive to put innovation on the streets and pull money out of pockets is actually actively endangering me in the future. Not very bright outlook I must say.

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Self-driving cars should be far better at recognizing a human in most orientations/poses/outfits, regardless of the car's angle, or weather. It doesn't get distracted, can see 360 around the vehicle, has faster reaction, and is specifically timid around pedestrians. Even the best drivers could easily hit someone based on conditions.

There have been suggestions that pedestrians could make cities interesting, since a place like New York would have every pedestrian no longer afraid to just walk into traffic. The cars will just wait until a fully clear moment that may never come

It's this adversarial environment that I fear is the complication.

As you say, if you know the cars will stop and let you go, this power will corrupt.

Extend this thinking to bicyclists, skateboarders, delivery riders, motorcyclists, car enthusiasts driving themselves - all able to simply cut off a self driving car knowing it will give way.

But there is more adversarial out there.

AI input hacking to get known responses. Cars disabled because of gang tagging on sensors.

Car enthusiasts or privacy enthusiasts (privacy shouldn't require enthusiasm but here we are...) updating car firmware/software. People with full physical access!

And we haven't touched on the ethical stuff which is a world of discussion in itself.

Self driving cars by evolution in current societal rules etc will take a LONG time.

> if you know the cars will stop and let you go, this power will corrupt.

> Extend this thinking to ... - all able to simply cut off a self driving car knowing it will give way.

But this is already the case; if I jump into slow moving traffic in a (western) city centre the cars will let me through, possibly even without honking. The only things to fear are distracted drivers (which is the same with the AI, because I can't know whether the AI sees me) and the occasional madman, but those are rare.

What's more interesting as you point out are situations where other drivers will take advantage of the AI's adherence to rules and safety. That's going to be especially fun in cities like Napoli, where things like driving through red signal are completely normal. It's probably not going to work there at all in its current state.

>As you say, if you know the cars will stop and let you go, this power will corrupt.

Would stepping out in front of a car be illegal?

Which, in the abstract, is an interesting theoretical question, but California recently decided to basically legalize jaywalking.

https://laist.com/news/transportation/understanding-new-cali...

That's the thing isn't it.

If "person walks in front of car" event is rare, then the automatic car stop saving a life or minimising injury is nice. Saved a person from a bad day for a minor inconvenience for the car people.

If a NY city worth of people do it without regard, then cars will be gridlocked.

My guess is:

- Assuming self driving cars that that stop for pedestrians are common

- then laws against deliberately walking in front will exist

- to judge the dispute of "deliberate" there will be more cameras, because why wouldn't there be...

It's long past time that we turn the streets back over to pedestrians. Communities are much more enjoyable when car-free.

Potentially, but sometimes I think we do forget how surprisingly good humans can be at this, and how hard it can be for computer detection systems to work well enough without also having a high number of false-positives where it will slam on the brakes for something it didn’t need to stop for (and in doing so, potentially even causing an accident!)

> [...], since a place like New York would have every pedestrian no longer afraid to just walk into traffic.

London already has near suicidal pedestrians.

And I say that with respect: it's the opposite of the usual tragedy of the commons. Every pedestrian in central London who just crosses the street without looking places themselves in appreciable danger, but contributes a tiny bit to training London drivers to be extra careful.

(Going off on a tangent: tipping is an interesting opposite.

If everyone in the US stopped tipping tomorrow, economic equilibrium would shift so that service sector people would have comparatively higher nominal wages and roughly the same overall income. That's how it is in Japan or Australia or Singapore (or the US before the 20th century), where tipping is either less common or severely frowned upon.

Because eg prospective waitstaff in the US expect to be tipped, they accept lower wages. Similarly, a single patron not tipping in the US gets a lot of social awkwardness without shifting the equilibrium much. A single waiter in the US not accepting tips loses out on income and also gets social awkwardness, also without shifting the equilibrium much.)

Like my driving teacher told me in lessons (to admonish my safety focused thinking): do you really think everyone you're sharing the road with has a driving license? I guess he has a point. There are people driving out there without a license, or with suspended license, and all kinds of various situations. Which is why we drive defensively and have to be ready for drivers that don't always follow the rules.

I would argue that someone without a driving license will drive more carefully not to gez caught. Also suspended license doesn't make you forget the rules.

> Also suspended license doesn't make you forget the rules.

No, but there's probably a good reason it's suspended. It's not that you forgot the rules. It's just that you're not following them.

You can get your driver's license suspended for all kinds of driving-unrelated stuff, including not paying child support (which is what I don't get at all - how is someone without a driver's license supposed to go to work to make the money?!).

"how is someone without a driver's license supposed to go to work to make the money?!"

Presumably by paying their child support.

I don't know if it works as intended, and it wouldn't surprise me if people have horror stories about clueless rulings by clueless judges, but obviously the intent is that the license is suspended because the person is intentionally not paying child support.

> > Also suspended license doesn't make you forget the rules.

> No, but there's probably a good reason it's suspended.

Not paying the renewal fee on time is a big reason. That's a rule, indeed, but nothing related to driving or safety.

That seems rather naive. Most people driving without a drivers license probably aren’t thinking that rationally…

My guess is that self driving cars are already far, far better than human drivers at not hitting pedestrians.

My guess is that it depends a lot on the driver. There are a lot of really reckless drivers, or really bad drivers out there on the roads right now. I know people who've been in several (relatively minor) car crashes, driving the same-ish sort of route to/from college and work that I was during the same period. I think they're just a bad driver. I feel like they're driving recklessly when I'm a passenger in a car they're driving. So a self-driving car might be a better driver than them, while also being worse than the median driver, and much much worse than like the upper portion of the human driver spectrum, like the 1st quintile of the 20% of human drivers who are pretty good.

Given how reckless some drivers are, I'd imagine the distribution of crashes among drivers is very skewed. I don't know numbers, but I'd expect to see something like 80% of car crashes involving (or objectively caused by) 20% of the drivers, with most car crashes involving people who have been involved in numerous crashes, and a large minority of drivers having been involved in zero car crashes.

> My guess is that it depends a lot on the driver.

There is a lot of variation in drivers. Young ones with good reflexes and senses but bad on experience, old ones with worse reflexes and senses but better on experience. Ones that stop at stop signs, ones that blow through them if they think they can get away with it. Cities like New Orleans where drivers are much more aggressive because the cops don't care, etc...

I think the important point is that self driving cars are likely better than the averaged real world population of existing human drivers at avoiding pedestrians.

The average is not the only stat though, and doesn't tell everything. Even if it were true that FSD was safer than the average of human drivers, replacing some manually-steered cars with FSD cars could result in more pedestrians getting hit, depending on the breakdown within the two groups. The overall average isn't enough information and obscures the internal distribution of skill/safety within the overall population of drivers.

It matters who is driving what cars. If you're taking safe drivers and having them drive FSD cars, and comparing the average of that against the average of all non-FSD driven cars (which includes a lot of really shitty drivers in the average), then the net safety impact of this could be nothing. Introducing FSD cars would have no impact to overall car safety, and might even have a negative impact, if the FSD software is worse than the good drivers who are now not driving manually-steered cars but are driving FSD cars instead.

You might think that the average is not too terrible, but wow, there are some people at that one pointy end of the bell curve that make you shake your head.

I present, "Canada's Worst Driver," a series that I watched quite a bit when I had a cable subscription. Besides being hilarious, it should make you think a time or three before crossing the street. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHB4WuM7Y_eP-PFv5F6To...

The issue i speculate is the tradeoffs are more imposing than with a human. Sure i accept that the car can drive more safely than a human (all it has to do is never exceed 1mph) but as safety increases i speculate it involves accepting tradeoffs like cars getting stuck, driving slowly, blocking traffic, hard braking when not necessary, or even restricting the operating domain.

By your use of German, I assume that you experience a far higher driving standard than people in North America and frankly most of the world, and even that is far from perfect.

The Vertrauensgrundsatz does not account for distracted, tired and inebriated drivers.

On the other hand, you might be able to let self driving car take you anywhere instead of asking someone give you a ride.

I don’t think a self-driving hearse will calm their nerves

People showing up to their destinations dead, having passed away in a self-driving vehicle, is inevitable. May as well make it work on our terms.

I seldomly ask others for a ride, I prefer to pay a taxi cab. And no, I would still prefer a taxi driver over an autonomous vehicle even if they were available, because a human is still very much useful when it comes to the last 50 meters of a trip. I often ask for guidance to find the correct entrance, for instance. BTW, your argument is very cheap, I tend to hear it often. "You are afraid of roboters? Here is one, play with it, you will like it!"

>Sure, one might say these new self driving systems will "just" have to follow that same rule as well,

Next round of CAPTCHA: click the squares with blind pedestrians

think about it, this is how these things are being trained--by people frantically trying to click stupid images just to get to the webpage they wanted.

As a pedestrian who isn't disabled but just inattentive and erratic, I know I will feel much safer around 100 waymo cars than 100 human cars.

The crucial word in your sentence is "feel". If you think technology can only do good, you will likely feel safer around AVs. And since I have an inherent distrust regarding complicated tech, I "feel" less safe with more automation. Both of our feelings are subjective. The question is, will we be less or more safe?

Depends on the safety statistics of the specific tech. Around Waymo? Safer!

I wonder if we’ll all start wearing some kind of markers that these cars can more easily pick up. Like a blind person’s cane could be a specific hue or be otherwise easy to detect by driverless cars. Or cars could detect the UWB signal (like AirTags use) from our phones which is very precise.

Basically, maybe there’s better ways than standard vision (which for computers is still kinda basic compared to a person) to solve the pedestrian hitting problem.

Yeah but what a sad dystopia where you need to wear a beacon just to be outside without risking death, especially if like jogging on a sidewalk or riding a bike.

The cars are clearly the danger to everyone who isn’t in a car, why would the burden be on everyone else, all the time?

To be completely fair: joggers and bicyclists already wear such beacons.

I really don't want to be fair though, because I think your point is totally correct.

Why?

Because reality.

Since the advent of motor vehicles, I would argue risk has generally scaled with the efficiency and power of vehicles.

At the minimum, for 70 years we have known that danger to both pedestrians and safe drivers is ever present and growing. The reality is not about who SHOULD deal with this problem, but how to most effectively arrive at a functional solution which actually reduces risk for drivers and pedestrians alike.

As well, it's worth noting most accidents occur in areas where you drive most often and you're most familiar. And the increase in traffic accidents and fatalities over the last 10+ years has been due to driver distractions, ie cell phones etc, more than anything by a lot.

Yes there are reckless drivers out there doing stupid shit. However, that's always been the case. Now it's just easier than ever to capture them on camera and for them to go faster than ever for cheap. However, even back in the 70's, crash safety technology was laughably behind anything we have so it goes both ways imo.

> As well, it's worth noting most accidents occur in areas where you drive most often

It would be more remarkable if most accidents occurred in areas where you rarely go.

Where I am from, there used to be a time when certain people had to wear markers. We dont want to be reminded of that.

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