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> I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large

Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a degree that people just don't comprehend. Human would be terrible drivers even if you ignored the fact that many of them are chemically impaired, even if you ignored the fact that they are prone to rage and aggression.

As we consider the safety of self-driving vehicles, there is going to be a disorienting amount of cognitive dissonance as we are forced to confront the awfulness of what we already accepted and have been living with for a century. There were over 42,000 deaths due to motor vehicle accidents in 2022. That means if we created self-driving cars that were twice as safe as humans, they might save 21,000 lives per year and also kill 21,000 people per year. That sounds insane, but it would be a sane way of improving an insane situation.

Kibitzing about these individual incidents is a normal and inevitable human way to try to deal with the problem, but we need some way of measuring how deadly self-driving cars are in comparison to how deadly human drivers are. I never see that, so I wonder how we're going to know when we should loosen the reins on them? Are regulators actually doing their jobs, or are they just going to move inexorably forward while occasionally throwing bones to public outrage?

The stakes here are huge, tens of thousands of deaths and horrific injuries per year, and we will unnecessarily kill lots of people if we deploy self-driving technology too fast or too slowly.

The way this will probably work out in practice is regulators choosing the path of least resistance between uninformed public outrage and greed-driven industry pressure. What we should be asking for is a data-driven approach.

“We” have done nothing of this sort. SF is its own trashfire and they just gave up on enforcing any traffic violations except parking which brings revenue. You can look this up in their own stats for this year

The problem is that you can't punish a car.

If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them. There was a case where a woman was drunk driving and hit a man, he came up over the hood and into her windshield. He was alive but bleeding. She drove home and parked her car in the garage. He bled out through the night. NO ONE was sympathetic towards that woman.

But if an automated vehicle does it, it just becomes a line item that someone somewhere has to pay. You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability.

What we should be doing is making it an existential crisis for these companies. That will never happen and thus self driving vehicles will become good enough and that's it.

> The problem is that you can't punish a car.

You can punish the manufacturer of any item that creates an excessive danger to the public.

Lawn darts aren't intended to be thrown near people, and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently. Human-driven cars are used negligently and kill 40,000 Americans a year.

> and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently

Lawn darts don't exist because the FDA banned them. Without that happening, they'd still be sold today.

> Kids can hurt themselves with bicycles and archery and rifles, too. Why aren’t they included? I’d rather be hit by a lawn dart than by a horseshoe

-- R. B. Jarts, inventor of lawn darts.

This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the company" is absurdly high.

Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any sort of jail time in association with the deaths (and, after it was banned, they started selling the dalkon shield in poorer regions).

A serial killer killing 10 people gets the death penalty, yet there exist mining companies that have easily killed 1000s of employees with silicosis (and are still operating today, looking at you Dow [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster

yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you.

But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.

Yeah, the big issue we have is that we reward ignorance. It's in the legal best interest for companies producing physical products to be as oblivious as possible to issues of safety. Legally, the worst the worst outcome for them happens when there's documented evidence of safety problems. It's far better to feign ignorance. "Who could have predicted that opioids were addictive!". "How could we have known that this doctor was overprescribing, we are a big company without the resources to track everything".

It should really be the opposite in an ideal world. A company that has documented "this is what we did to make sure everything was safe" should less culpable than the company that moves fast and breaks things/people/the planet.

If a company killed someone, I'd want their defense to be a list of everything they did to prevent that person from dying, not a "well shucks, accidents happened, and this was a tragedy that couldn't be avoided!". That's the response that should end a company's existence.

> If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them.

Really? If they had been in a car accident caused by another driver, and took a few seconds to pull over because they were unaware they were dragging a person initially hit by the other driver, they would have been charged?

It's very hard to hold people responsible, and it's telling that you had to cite such a grisly and outrageous example. Unless you're drunk or it's a hit-and-run, you're unlikely to face any charges beyond a traffic violation.

> You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability.

Of course? Exactly like we've mandated for human drivers since the 1970s?

All this hand-wringing about things that we've accepted our whole lives with human drivers.

I'll say it again: we need data-driven approach to figuring out when autonomous vehicles reach the threshold of becoming less deadly than human drivers. If we jump the gun and allow widespread adoption too soon, people will die unnecessarily. If we drag our feet and allow widespread adoption too late, people will die unnecessarily.

> Really? If they had been in a car accident caused by another driver, and took a few seconds to pull over because they were unaware they were dragging a person initially hit by the other driver, they would have been charged?

unless you believe this person stayed completely silent during this, the answer is yes. The measuring stick that the law tends to use for liability like this is the reasonable person test and no reasonable person drives 20 feet with someone screaming in pain after having HIT their car.

Are there circumstances in which someone would NOT be charged? sure, there have been cases of toddlers running out in front of cars and it was determined the driver couldn't possible have seen them due to their height.

Since you apparently misunderstood, the point about the insurance is that maybe we shouldn't allow companies to insure themselves against killing people. We as a society absolutely went after Ford for choosing not to do recalls because the estimated cost of the recall exceeded the estimated payout for the deaths and injuries. Under no circumstances should we allow companies to make decisions like this.

Sorry but this just comes off as completely out of touch to me. Yes, I agree that there would be a legal case to charge someone in such a scenario. But what actually happens, at least in NYC, is that the cops and prosecutors will bend over backwards to give a driver the benefit of the doubt.

Sounds to me like you have an axe to grind somewhere and it's affecting your judgement on this issue.

Cruise showed the DMV a video that cut out just before their car dragged (ran over) the pedestration. Effectively they were trying to do a hit and run as well by not showing footage of their car's behaviour that caused the injuries.

The issue isn't even that Cruise was involved in an incident. They were not at fault for the collision and were only involved after a (human) driver launched the victim into the Cruise vehicle. Cruise had their permit suspended because they essentially tried to hide their involvement/responsibility and withheld video footage from the DMV.

My theory is that we’re just going to read about a never-ending (but possibly increasingly rare) series of edge cases. And in every one, it’ll be dismissed as “oh that was a really rare edge case” yet humans would have been able to make a better choice in the same circumstances.

Self driving reduces to AGI

This makes sense, although I think that as the edge cases get rarer and rarer it’ll be a tossup whether a human could have reacted better.