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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

So you want to deliberately put your family in more danger just so that it'll be your fault if they get hurt?

I think part of the problem is that random failure modes that auto driving does is extremely terrifying, even if you know statistically it is safer. The nature of the failures are unpredictable and alien to a human understanding of driving, and therefore appears something akin to “a small portion of the time, your car will randomly, catastrophically explode, but it happens less often than when you would statistically have an accident”. People would 150% not drive that thing!

Thank you for putting that in terms people here may understand better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control

It's a cognitive bias in all of us, including the lawmakers approving the use of self driving cars.

I disagree, I'm aware of that fallacy and that's not quite what I'm getting at.

I've driven cars for 20 years and my driving has (imo) improved over that time.

I'm at a level where I don't see a reason for me to get into any serious accident by my hand. It's just not going to happen * fingers crossed *.

I know my driving style. I know I'm a safe driver.

Now, why would I give that security over to "FSD", which is clearly a decade (if that) away from being user-ready?

Don't get me wrong, as said, certain automation is cool ... stop/start in heavy traffic, lane assist, cruise control, crash avoidance even ... but beyond that? I'm A-ok ... don't need to introduce the risk from half-baked code (no offense, but that's true at this stage) or AI where we don't really yet know what the output will be (despite being impressive "most" of the time).

Now, I'm speaking about me. You can do what you like. And if you're willing to hand over the reigns of your life to some beta programme, be my guest. Just don't drive in the opposite direction to me for, say, another 10 years. Thanks.

So would you do it if it was a better driver than you? Your earlier comment said you wouldn't even if it made a crash less likely. I'm not really sure how to parse that given this followup.

Yes, but as said, an automated system would need to be almost perfect, which it is nowhere near.

At it's best, and most of the time, an automated system will be a far superior driver than me.

However, coding error and AI hallucination mean I will not touch these systems until extremely proven. And we're at least 10 years from that, if at all.

(note I'm talking about true FSD not the current nonsense. An experience where you can have hands and eyes off the road. With the current nonsense, the novelty is cool, but when that wears off you're just a manager of your car. The worst of both worlds. You have to pay attention to the road and get none of the pleasure of driving. What a fail).

Perhaps a more generous interpretation is that just because a self-driving performs better than humans overall doesn't mean it performs better the specific situations you drive in. Though even then I think it might be dubious.

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