I Conscientiously Object to Self-Driving Cars
raypatrick.xyz
raypatrick.xyz
According to Wikipedia [1], US-operated drones have killed 910-2,200 civilians, of which 283-454 were children. This all happened with multiple humans in the loop. Those humans decided occasionally killing children is a perfectly acceptable cost of doing business.
Which is, when you think about it, not too far from how human-driven cars and the car infrastructure operates. We just decided some people are going to die and that's an acceptable cost of business. At least, in case of cars, the population that benefits from having cars are (more or less) the same population that's killed by them.
But don't tell me it's superior because there's an (incompetent, sometimes sleepy, sometimes drunk) human in the loop. That's just lame "At least there's always someone we can blame!" BS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
Listen to yourself. What is your argument here? Because humans sometimes make choices you find abhorrent, therefore it is better for humans to make machines that behave abhorrently instead? This is like saying killing someone is more moral when you hire a hitman to do it for you.
How is it lame to say there should always be someone to blame? How is that BS? You are making an point that seems to have no logical connection to your premise.
It seems to me that moral decisions, whether made to your personal standard or not, must morally remain in the hands of humans. Otherwise, we are saying to ourselves that morality improves when people turn away from reality, ignore facts, embed themselves in fantasy.
It’s perfectly reasonable to decide that a certain level of danger is acceptable in return for some personal or societal benefit. In a just and reasonable society, we must have mechanisms for revisiting and adjusting that calculus, and we must create mechanisms that incentivize responsible behavior. What frightens me about self-driving cars is that instead of a car accident being a dispute between people, it’s now a dispute among corporations. Accountability is diffused and nullified. And to adjust that system requires glacially slow congressional action.
I don’t mind that premature death can happen. My sister died in a car crash in 1985. One thing that made it tolerable is that we knew how it happened and why it happened. The people involved were people who had put themselves at risk in knowable, reasonable ways. My sister wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. It was the middle of a snow storm. The other driver had misjudged the curve. Head on collision. Tragic, but acceptable.
With self-driving cars, your safety is fully in the thrall of inscrutable and unknowable factors, controlled by people who are not themselves at any risk. THAT should offend you.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Also its makes it sound like a liability on the compagnies when its a lot more accurate to call "risk that consumers consciously decide to take for the sake of their transportation", which will never be 0 as in any activité / sport in life. And no one wants to ban car (or orther adrénaline sport) because they are so useful or provide a service.
If anything there are bilions poured into car security ..
That's correct, but it doesn't refute the point of the article, which is that having humans in the loop to make life or death decisions is better than punting those decisions to a computer. Suppose the US had fielded autonomous drones that required no human intervention to release lethal weapons. Would you prefer that to what actually happened?
(And no, saying that you'd prefer that the US not operate the drones at all is not an answer for this discussion, because the analogy to that would be not allowing driving at all. And that's obviously a non-starter.)
> We just decided some people are going to die and that's an acceptable cost of business.
Again, while this is true, it doesn't refute the point of the article, which is that the cost is less with humans in the loop. Would you prefer that automated Teslas running over pedestrians in crosswalks were the new normal, and we just wrote that off as a "cost of doing business"?
I notice that the US has a car-first culture and infrastructure that is hostile to pedestrians, is this merely a reflection of that culture? The reason it comes to mind is if this car fails to stop for people how did it get past safety regulations?
Due to their under-classification, there are no safety regulations at all in the US that prevent deployment on the roads. This is in contrast to the EU where FSD is not allowed or available because it can not get past EU safety regulations.
Because of this, it had a lot of trouble calculating trajectories and decided the best course of action was to hit a cone dead center.
I emailed the FSD Beta team about this, and they didn't respond.
I still use the system but my trust in it has been eroded quite a bit.
Honestly, I often think about trading the car in for a "normal" electric car that doesn't have any self-driving features so that I'm not tempted to use them. For super long drives, LKAS is enough.
Why anyone is okay with beta testing these things with live non consenting humans around is just baffling.
The problem may be that we are trying to solve a lack of hardware using software. Level 4/5 self-driving probably requires specific infrastructure to be installed on all roads, a way to coordinate collision resolution among all cars of all manufacturers (something similar to TCAS in aviation, but operating with a higher number of vehicles involved and on a much shorter time frame), and most likely a ban on non self-driving cars.
Of course, this carries an economical and social cost that is unacceptable nowadays. So we are trying to make self-driving cars work on an infrastructure that was never designed for automated use (and sometimes even makes human drivers confused), by giving a regular car with a few extra sensors to an AI driver and trying to get it to achieve human-like capabilities as an intelligent agent, which is beyond our technological ability at the moment.
But it will kill statistically fewer people than you will. You are a imprecise bag of mostly water with slow reaction times that gets tired.
The responsible thing is to know when you are not suited for a job and get out of the way, so lives can be saved.
We can argue about whether Tesla is at that point of course and whether they have adequate testing and precautions, but the best way statistically to avoid killing people is to realize you should no longer drive (when the technology has matured to that point and Tesla may not have).
You're right, replacement day has not arrived yet. (Especially not by tesla). But it is coming. And I suspect this generation of drivers wont consider stepping aside, much less actually doing so.
But my kids didn't have the same desire to drive that I did. For them it wasn't a big deal, there were alternatives (like uber). They did learn, but only pretty much cause they had to. My grandkids probably won't learn. My great grand kids certainly won't. No more than I can ride a horse.
Sure, it's not today, butvyhe day is coming. Its not far away now (on human time lines, not necessarily tech time lines).
Until then, enjoy the ride ;)
But eliminating human drivers isn't just eliminating that. It's also eliminating humans who are not tired, who are making good judgment calls, and who do have the patience and consideration to drive responsibly. Unless you are claiming there are no such humans anywhere, which is ridiculous (the majority of human drivers meet the requirements the majority of the time).
For self-driving technology to be truly viable, in other words, it's not enough for it to outperform humans who are tired and impaired. It has to outperform humans at their best. Otherwise the humans who aren't tired and impaired will have no good reason to use it, and will have an ironclad objection to being forced to.
This is a different argument from the one in the article. You are arguing that you will outperform the AI and therefore should remain the driver. And you want proof to change your mind.
Both are reasonable and I agree.
The author isn't demanding proof that it is statistically better before switching. They object to giving up control and view that as a moral imperative, "no matter how “safe” the computerized features are."
For most industries zero deaths is the norm, so clearly computers have to be at least that good. Frankly we're so collectively bad at driving that we'd be an order of magnitude better if the computers only killed 100 000 a year.
In over 100 years of driving humans have, at best, gotten worse. We continue to kill despite cars being better and safer.
On the other hand 100 years of improvement to self-driving cars will (I predict) drop those deaths to under 1000.
Referring to the effects after a collision, and not the cause of the collision itself, is valid, but secondary.
There is nothing special about you that makes you more able to drive cars than anyone else and especially compared to a computer. In a few years it will considered crazy and unsafe to drive your own car and comments like this will be chuckled at.
In a few years? Surely you jest. Self-driving tech is nowhere near being able to outperform all human drivers, which is what would be required for your statement to make sense.
A post from another article claims that these vehicles have undergone 3 million miles of testing without causing death or serious injury. The annual loss of lift due to human operated vehicles is estimated to be 50 thousand, across 3 trillion miles of driving. There has not been enough testing done to prove that self-driving cars are any safer in this regard. If you have data suggesting otherwise, please provide it.
> The responsible thing is to know when you are not suited for a job and get out of the way, so lives can be saved.
The introduction to this article suggests that it is people who must make the final decision because machines are fallible. They may have super-human attention spans and be able to make precise calculations regarding a scenario, but they lack judgement. They cannot determine whether something is reasonable, like 300 missiles being launched from the Arctic ocean.
Humans may be imperfect, and they certainly make bad judgement calls, but the reality is that we don't have sufficient evidence to suggest that self-driving cars will be any safer. Until we have enough evidence to prove their safety, there should be a human making that final call.
Speak for yourself.
Individual human beings are not statistics. If you have evidence that someone is an unreliable driver, sure, take steps to deal with that. But don't tell people with an unblemished safety record at driving that "statistics" say they are unreliable.
I would 100% back banning private ownership.
Even for people who have a perfect, unblemished safety record at driving? Which, btw, is the majority of drivers on the road?
Basically, you're saying you're fine with punishing the responsible people who take driving seriously and do it safely, because of the mistakes of a few irresponsible people who don't. That's backasswards. You should be focusing on the irresponsible people and leave the responsible ones alone.
Firstly, the tech of the 70s and 80s which he's referring to is clearly irrelevant when talking about the state of the art today.
Secondly, the penalty for failure for incorrectly launching nuclear missiles is, well, somewhat severe. You are pretty much ending the world.
Granted driverless cars will kill people. I think one has to start there. I dontvthinkvthe standard can be, or should be, zero deaths. [1] The question is whether they'll kill fewer people than human drivers (currently around a million a year.)
Self driving cars will get better. Each improvement will persist forever. Ultimately deaths will become newsworthy. Which is to be hoped for, because right now those million deaths a year are ignored.
[1] every day (unpredictable) people are involved in and endless game of chicken - with other drivers, with pedestrians, cycles and so on. Most people err on the chicken side most of the time.
Self driving cars are (and will become more) predictable. It's easy to play chicken with a computer that doesn't care about you - you yield early and quickly. Being predictable makes the game much healthier - for the other player.
that's an awfully bold claim with regards to a field that seems to be now-and-forever software dominated.
eventually the hardware will stabilize into a 'good enough' equilibrium like any commodity electronic device -- i'm not as comfortable saying that about the software given market/corporate incentive structures as they exist today and the (so-far) inherent 'always-connected' automotive platforms.
Are there any upcoming technologies HN does not have an aversion toward?
In particular to self-driving cars, it is a distraction from other technological development we could be doing, it continues to hold up the car as a source for peoples' affection and keeps cars relevant, and the need for self-driving cars has never been articulated in a way that makes any sense.
Uh, it's literally already here and being extensively tested in cities.
Waymo and Cruise are currently testing systems with no driver that do at least a passable job in most standard city driving conditions for (self-reported) hundreds to thousands of hours between traffic incidents. Humans average a few 10K-100K hours between traffic incidents so it is at least within the general ballpark. It remains to be seen whether they can improve adequately and robustly to be better than human drivers.
It is literally here in the sense that there are cars with no drivers that can operate for on the order of years (self-reported) without a critical failure that are currently in testing. It is not here yet in that human drivers are amazing and we do not know if AVs are better than human drivers as there is insufficient, unbiased evidence and the more extensive testing with safety drivers indicate they are still a factor of 10x to 100x away.
I don't need, for example, a self driving car to be able to handle snow particularly well, because it does not snow where I live. I don't need it to be able to drive well off-road because there are roads everywhere I go. I don't need it to be able to tow a trailer or a caravan, or drive a heavy vehicle. Self driving technology does not need to surpass humans in every single driving condition in order to be useful to a large number of people.
Is there anything on the horizon you are interested in / enthusiastic about?
Personally I never use Google Maps to find my way, I never use Uber to commute, I always book hotels and flights through a travel agent, all my computers run XP, I watch all TV from plastic DVDs, I listen to music on more plastic discs, I go into the bank or write checks to do any transactions.
Or maybe, I do none of that anymore.
I absolutely agree there's a bunch of crap. I argue that there's a bunch of really excellent good things in there too. (I'll add rocket landings to the list because they are so insanely cool.)
With regard to crypto; it's just the latest in histories long list of get-rich-quick schemes. I think we can ignore that. (Human greed is human greed).
I think most of your list boils down to a mix of shitty humans, the Free market in action, and things playing out to their natural conclusion in an extreme capitalistic society. A lot of the things (not all) are very localised to the US.
To your point though, I think two shifts in attitude are in play. One, technology has a higher bar to reach when it comes to safety. We accept that to err is human and expect that a human driver will have remorse and shame and may even be punished. With a self-driving car these things don't exist. Two, we have a lower tolerance to death and injury. Imagine cars didn't exist (but for some reason roads did) and you invented the car with all of today's safety standards. You would never get it approved.
Same for comments, voting is not agreeing, its saying that a point us well made and adds to the discussion.
As to HN aversion to new technologies - thats a mix of an aging demographic (fear of making my job obsolete), a reflexive aversion to hype over substance, (a thing which nerds have tradionally been against because, well, we are bad at hype and view people good at it as undermining our substantive work), and in some cases because there's objectively not much value in the tech even if it succeeds.
It's the way of the world. People whine about new stuff all the time, from their hand-held-hi-tech computer, over the connect-everything network, while binging their favorite sitcom from the 90s. Because, you know, those techs are from the oldentimes .
Ooooo Shiny!
This isn't proof, it's the author selectively choosing a particular video that supports their point of view. Maybe the video actually does demonstrate a problem with the self driving software, but without more supporting data it's simply cherry picking.
While I support a person in the middle kind of system, I don't think the author supports his case well. It's an opinion piece, basically.
What they don’t have a visceral reaction is to be saved from a collision with a drunk driver or their own error.
Nothing else to discuss here, move along.
As an aside he's an obnoxious religious fundamentalist who believes the current state of the country is caused not by concrete dysfunction from one side but by lack of Jesus and this is the third individual of questionable character on these pages today, all from you, and none of them have much interesting to say in the blog posts you have shared. Bad people sometimes have ideas worth sharing but you aren't exactly batting a thousand here. Please find more interesting things.
The person becomes visible as separating from the cross walk in the video 1 second in and intersection with the crosswalk happens about 3 seconds in. A reaction time of 1 second gives you 1 second to bring the car to a complete stop.
Pedestrians playing frogger by stepping out directly in front of cars that can't reasonable react in time are often deemed at fault. In one particular groan inducing situation a pedestrian was successfully sued for the damaged caused by the collision.
Beyond legal liability slamming on the brakes in this situation is just logically the wrong thing to do. A good driver would note that they are going to pass the pedestrian without incident. A bad driver slamming on the brakes drastically increases the chance of an accident in an attempt to slavishly follow a poorly understood interpretation of the rules at the expense of actual safety.
If you slam on the brakes at one second you will come to rest 3 feet from the pedestrian who will predictably freak out.
If you slam on the brakes at 1.5 seconds you probably hit them.
If you slam on the brakes at 2 seconds you will probably come to rest in front of them pointlessly.
If the pavement is wet or your car is even slightly shitty you will almost certainly hit them
In any case you risk injuring yourself, risk a collision with another car which you will be responsible for.