Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

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I thought that the whole point of self driving cars is it eliminates every single one of the problems you just listed. Humans get tired, drunk, distracted, ignore warnings about low pressure in the tires etc. A computer doesn’t worry about any of these things. It just complies or it doesn’t.

It’s kind of like the whole rust vs C++ debate. Rust proponents say that Rust as a language just eliminates a whole class of errors(memory errors). They’re just nonexistent anymore. Sure there are new problems, but they’re hopefully less commonplace. Your argument would be like a C++ programmer saying, “can we see some statistics on how many security vulnerabilities show up in code written by a modern C++ developer using smart pointers and RAII? That way they can make more informed decisions over whether rust is necessary.”

I think it would be interesting to see some alternative statistics, but I’m looking forward to the day nobody gets killed by an irresponsible drunk driver because cars don’t allow people to drive at all. Plus, once all the humans are off the road, I presume new technology can be made to reduce traffic patterns and other cool things.

If you implement stuff with AI for either school or a company, I'd get used to this kind of goalpost moving.

AIs currently beat "average" humans at just about every task, if done by itself. Multimodal models will do more, but they're for next year. But reading, writing, translating, talking, listening, controlling robots, designing proteins, modeling chemical reactions, driving, ... so currently it is fancy to compare AIs to absolute top human performance, while ignoring the problems even top performing humans have (such as needing to sleep, not knowing every language, cost, ...)

I'm very excited about self driving cars. But I think this is a real question to be answered. The 80:20 rule applies in much of life, and it's probable that a small minority of drivers cause the majority of accidents and deaths.

It's quite possible that replacing all drivers with self driving cars would both:

* Improve road safety dramatically

* Worsen road safety for the people not in the accident-prone minority

I don't this is a frivolous question. My post got a lot of replies, but no one came forward with any data on the distribution of accidents.

An insurer might have good insight here.

The 80:20 “rule” is interesting because it’s not a rule, it’s an observation. The Pareto Principle isn’t a law for a reason, because it’s observing the natural result of categorizing data. This medium article was surprisingly good[0] and makes a good point: even if you eliminate those 20% of drivers you won’t see an 80% decrease in accidents because the system as a whole fluctuates daily.

I don’t think anyone came forward with any data in the replies because this distribution is impossible to come up with. Like another commenter pointed out, we all account for those distracted drivers, or tired drivers, or “accident prone” drivers at some point in our lives (possibly many points in our lives). Because of this it’s impossible to remove the 20% of the poorest drivers and have a dramatic increase in road safety.

The only way to fix this system would be to remove all the factors that you listed completely. The easiest way to remove those would be to stop having people drive cars. We won’t know if it’s safer or not until we get there, and it will still have its own 80:20 distributions, just based on different factors (and hopefully to a smaller degree).

[0]: https://medium.com/pinstriped/when-the-pareto-principle-goes...

That's a good point, but I purposefully didn't included "distracted driver" in the list. I ought to have put "extremely sleep deprived driver".

I personally have never driven drunk, extremely sleep deprived, holding a cellphone, or any of the rest. Apart from driving while young.

It's actually pretty easy to avoid the list. I guess to clarify my question you could ask: do self driving cars have the kinds of accidents people avoiding that list would never have?

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