You can certainly take the attitude "I will only agree with having autonomous cars on the street once they are provably 100000000x safer than a human" but I don't think that matches most people's view on what constitutes safety.
Also, that goes pretty strongly against the American ethos, where we let people make their own decisions in terms of what kind of things they buy, within reason.
We already know that SUVs are more dangerous for pedestrians, but I think most of us agree that making SUVs illegal for this reason would not be a good idea, and is against the American ethos.
As a non-american that doesn't own a car it's not that unreasonable for me :) At least banning SUVs that are excessively unsafe for pedestrians in a collision. Or maybe just ban it in cities where some walkability is expected. I just don't want to die by getting hit by a car
Most Americans couldn't care less about pedestrians. All they care about is where to park their car.
You seem to be expecting perfection, or a reasonable facsimile of it, but that's not the bar that's being set by the existing solution (people).
Using your example of even a pedestrian task such as buying airline tickets, humans generally have a worse error rate than a computer doing it.
Source: I live in the Philippines where manual handling is still de rigeur for everything from buying ferry tickets, to immigration paperwork, to car registration and driving licenses. The error rate is far, far higher than the automated systems that do these things in other countries.
Similarly, humans (in aggregate) are really not very good at driving cars safely. Software on the other hand, is only getting better at it as time goes on. It's perhaps debatable whether computers are currently better (again, in aggregate) than humans, but with the current state of the art my view is that they are.
I'd welcome these things with open arms in the Philippines compared to the average driver on the road. Or equally so in my home country of Australia, or the US, or anywhere where humans kill each other every day in fast-moving steel cages.
Now, I will note that the Phoenix area is by far the easiest driving I have ever encountered in 25 years of having a license. Wide roads, little traffic, few pedestrians (I moved here from NYC!), little weather, and I don't see them out as much at night. They crucially also completely avoid the most unpredictable driving in the area, for example Sky Harbor Airport, and near construction sites (there is construction in our kids school parking lot, and the Waymo won't go in- they will only drop us off next door and make us walk). But this too builds my confidence in the system- the people who are operating it seem to understand that it has limitations, which suggests to me that they are wearing their engineers hats and not management or, God forbid, salesmen hats. Is it perfect, I'm certain not. But I definitely prefer it to Uber or anything like that- no tip, no worry about the driver doing something concerning, just gets me where I want to go.
Instead we’re going to YOLO a half-baked tech-bro fantasy onto the roads and hope for the best?
Also “meatbags” has the same tone as “sportsball” imo.
Yes, the answer is "very". Over one percent (1 in 93, National Safety Council, 2021[1]) of Americans will die in a car crash. That is insane.
The data so far is clear that autonomous vehicles are safer, and it isn't close.
> Also “meatbags” has the same tone as “sportsball” imo.
We're comparing humans to computers. Sue me.
[1]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
The data so far on fatality rates is near nonexistent. There' a fatality every 75 million miles in the US with a human at the wheel, with significant proportions of those fatalities considered to be humans operating so far below the threshold for acceptable human driving we jail them for it. Waymo hit 1m autonomous miles this year.
The argument is not that self-driving cars are very safe, but that we tolerate risks that are quite large when it comes to humans doing the driving. Risks so high that it might not take all that much for entire categories of drivers to be less safe than a computer.
If we need 50+ years of certainty for self driving cars, we will never have said certainty, because we'd not let them drive, ever. And yet, we have very old people, those that are easily distracted, and people who often drive impaired in the road all the time. We also put them very close to places where we have pedestrians, and let them drive with huge differentials over said pedestrians.
We aren't really making the cars safe enough as it is, and in the US we lack any practical roadmaps to make them safer, other than, 'never walk, and drive in an increasingly bigger car'. We are YOLOing every day, with large, single passenger trucks that will strike a pedestrian at chest height.
So yes, self driving research is a better way out than hoping to change human drivers, whose hardware and software are hard to upgrade. I won't necessarily assume a Waymo car is better than most drivers today, but I'd already trust it more than some that have licenses today.
The status quo is really bad and we are doing a terrible job of making them safer for anyone besides the occupants of the vehicle causing a collision. So yeah, we should really focus on pushing technology that can reduce the danger of distractable drivers. That mostly should mean investing in public transit, walkability and speed-limited small vehicles like bikes or golf carts. But the bar for driverless cars is basically: do they speed? Do they drive on sidewalks? Do they kill a few people a day? No? Then they’re better than the status quo, because the status quo is awful.
What would make you happy with a self-driving safety record? Why not be excited about the future?
I understand when some folks think that the focus would be better spent on public transportation, but you just seem like a hater.
Gestures broadly at the world
I mean I guess you have a point. Go nuts with the driverless cars.
And yes, this money would be better spent on a huge number of things — public transit among them.
There are growing pains, absolutely, but at 2:15 am, crossing the street next to the bars, which driver with a red light are you going to step out in front of, crossing the street.
I know which one I'd choose.
"""The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. """
"""The number of vehicle-miles traveled on all roads in the United States decreased by some 1.55 percent to approximately 3.17 trillion in 2022. "
Ignoring some important details, that means americans drive 75 million miles before a person is killed. That seems .... awfully damn good to me.
The US is #5 (of 26 countries for which the statistic is available) in fatalities / km. That's only "awfully damn good to me" if your goal is to kill more people.
As the sibling comment points out, miles driven per death for pedestrians isn’t necessarily being improved by the mass and visibility and safety factors.
Proportional to population, pedestrian fatalities have risen significantly since 2010.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
I do not disagree the numbers are trending up (although, I believe rates/miles driven might show a different story, but I didn't grab the miles driven for years 1975-2021 to normalize).
Americans drive 400 MILLION miles before a pedestrian death.
Let that sink in. 400 million miles per ped death. That's just absolutely gob-smacking amazingly good for something involving direct human control of an enormous ton+ vehicle.
These cars can be hacked as used as weapons ... for terrorist attacks. As well malfunction and lock you in driving into the bay or off a cliff or etc.
Open to your rebuttal ;-)
It previously happened in Charlottesville sometime ago (https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/5/1/20...) and will surely happen again but possibly not just one car but a fleet as others in this thread agree/noted.
There's two sides ..either you're all for them or on the fence or against. Im on the fence with trusting Waymo more then Cruise as Waymo's been at it for more then a decade but am concerned about all things I noted.
I did not insult anyone it was tongue and cheek. As well i was just responding to the drinking and driving analogy which my argument and that are two different ones.
Interestingly missing from these discussions is: What does the distribution of accidents look like across the population of drivers?
It's possible to introduce an automated driver that is better than an average driver, but if the only people that use it are above-average drivers then you could end up with more accidents.
I'm not afraid of self driving cars because I know that even if they're not perfect, they will still be far better than the overwhelming majority of drivers on the road.
But the biggest of all — which this article repeatedly notes — is enforced speed limits. We could have that on “human cars” of course with GPS speed limiters, but that is of course politically impossible despite there not even being a coherent argument for why cars that can move faster than 75mph are legal to sell.
Drivers can pick and choose which laws to abide (see that incident just last week where David Simon made the case that speeding in school zones is just find); ultimately, a computer can be forced to do what it’s told. https://hellgatenyc.com/david-simon-got-a-speeding-ticket-in...
All that matters is, statistically, that the cars are better than humans at driving. And that's something that will eventually be achieved through a combination of software engineering, hardware engineering, and spending lots of money to build trust. Some number of people will still die in accidents even if the entire fleet is self-driving.
You might, if you do not already, find a like-minded crowd on the Risks mailing list, where they argue about 0.0000001% risks like "streetlights that turn green automatically when emergency response vehicles approach the intersection, fail at some rate because the designer didn't anticipate two emergency vehicles approaching the intersection at right angles" (which very very rarely causes an accident).
But last week, a block from home, this old lady killed a 4 year old in this city. Perhaps the little girl was a consenting participant to this, but I am quite doubtful.
It's plausible that this robot, albeit not bug-free, would drive safer than an average human driver.
This thing has a statistical safety rate. Which is either worse or better than your average Uber/Lyft/taxi driver.
But if it's better, it's better. And if you'd rather keep getting in vehicles with human drivers then they're statistically more dangerous, well that'll be your choice.
Among them being human driving, which hasn’t panned out well.