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Comment by 0zemp2c | Hacker News Reader

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I’m pretty content that “the day when AI in cars can handle ALL conditions on the road, ALL OF THE TIME” (emphasis mine) won’t happen in your lifetime, or indeed the lifetime of any currently gestating fetus.

It is also true that humans in general cannot drive [without crashing].

With suitable training they can.

The insurance industry expects the average insured driver to file a claim every 18 years. That's covering all conditions, all of the time. No "hand off to someone else when I get scared" because humans can't do that.

That's honestly pretty good.

Wake me when autonomous driving can get within a factor of two of that.

And if the have an accident they are liable.

Who is if a fully autonomous driving car has an accident.

Probably insurance companies, like in human crashes.

Including fatal accidents?

What about software or sensor errors?

They provably can.

human can't handle "ALL conditions ALL OF THE TIME" either

this is a false goal that doesn't exist in the real world

cars, planes, trains, all automation of any kind, all the code you ever wrote, nuclear power plants...all this and more operates with some fallibility that is deemed acceptable given the benefits

no one is excusing AV accidents that seem to defy common sense (randomly driving into barriers etc)...but humans fail in these ways too, every day

In case you’re living under a rock, it already happened. Are they perfect and driving everywhere in every city? No… but here in SF it is not unusual to see cars with no one in them, they’re driving all over the city, at all times, in parking lots, through school zones, etc

Also you’re trying to discredit a well credentialed individual (who worked in automotive safety regulation) based upon age/gender and other irrelevant factors. I feel the need to call that out as toxic.

The rollout beyond sf has been … slow. Which begs the question, how autonomous are autonomous vehicles? Is this a technology or an economics problem, or both?

There have been self driving vehicles in well constrained areas since the 90s or even earlier. They have been capable of complex route navigation, obstacle avoidance and responding to a variety of conditions. The technology hasn't really matured an order of magnitude past the automated vehicles that have been moving things around in factories for decades. The technology improvement has come in computing power and sensor tech where now it's just cheaper and easier to include this in more vehicles. There need to be major leaps before this can really become widespread. I would say at best we are at the Commodore 64 era of self driving cars. I think it's going to take even longer to get to the iphone era considering the result of failure could be death.

I don't think the poster is trying to discredit her based on age, just contextualizing her comment about it not happening in her lifetime by estimating what period that's likely to refer to.

The comment about her appeal to authority on the basis of being a fighter pilot is also more a counterpoint to crediting her additionally on that basis above any non-expert, since that skillset isn't actually particularly related to autonomous driving.

shrug, I'm older than her, so the age thing doesn't resonate with me

I appreciate her credentials, but I don't see why her statements are somehow unassailable

and I stick by my point that her history as a fighter pilot has no bearing

not sure where your "gender" point comes from? other than using the pronoun, I made no claims based on gender

I agree with the fact that "experts" are quite often wrong and it's too easy to be derailed by appeal to authority.

On the other hand she has a point. As long as the tech won't be 99.99xxxx safe, it will introduce moral hazard (she calls it "risk-homeostasis" but I don't think that kind of neologism is particularly expressive).

At a meta-level, coining some new term could make someone raise an eyebrow. Perhaps she just didn't know about it.

> This woman appears to be in her fifties...claiming autonomous driving will not happen in her lifetime

She doesn't claim that. You claim she claimed that. Why make things up?

In the interview she talks about existing autonomous driving applications that are operating today. How can you go from reading that part of her statements to your gross misinterpretation?

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