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Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

The problem I have with that argument is what's the comparison to, say, drunk driving or impaired driving?

While a car "dragging" someone can be traumatic and horrible in it's own right... objectively, if we could get rid of thousands of deaths a year in exchange for fewer "mishaps"?

In 2021 2,116 people age 15-20 died in car crashes. 13,384 people for DUI related deaths in 2021. 42,939 car related deaths.

If we could exchange 42k deaths for 1,000? wouldn't that be worth the tradeoff?

Basically the trolly problem where you have to choose between letting a train go forward and kill 5 people or hitting a button to change tracks and kill 1.

If we can get into the "9's" in accuracy and trust bypassing humans... why wouldn't we?

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You’re going to compare self-driving cars to drunk drivers so you can grade them on a curve?

If you’re drunk you’re going to have pay for a ride either by a person or possible by program or you can break the law. I don’t see anyone who was going to drive drunk not do it because they could pay for a robot taxi over a real taxi. Here’s my comparison. If your self-driving car kills or maims someone in a situation where a normal sober person driving wouldn’t have it shouldn’t be on the road.

> If your self-driving car kills or maims someone in a situation where a normal sober person driving wouldn’t have

What if it does this while also _not_ killing/harming in many other situations where a human would have?

Drunk driving was one of many examples and one of many reasons people die driving. Did you not notice I also mentioned teen drivers (inexperienced drivers). And the full numbers of people killed by drivers - NOT just drunk drivers?

"if your thing makes a mistake it shouldn't be on the road" yet the roads are full of people that make mistakes. (Hint: thousands of them die every year learning. See above about kids dying each yar).

So you'll focus on one of many reasons to sidestep the question (bias of some sort?) so I'll say it again:

At some point computers will be smart enough, fast enough and safe enough to do a better job at driving than people. Mistakes will be made but - like drunk drivers - humans make mistakes too. So if we can move to a safer way... why wouldn't we? Why are you willing to sacrifice thousands of kids lives if we can eventually progress to a better and safer option?

Is this a problem that needs solving? Would you be comfortable dying in a car crash where it's due to faulty software? What if you replace the humans with machines and after that as a result of a bug you get 200k deaths in a year?

If that were the case, liability insurance rates for self-driving vehicles would be much much higher than their manually piloted counterparts.

"faulty software" compared to the human factor?

that's like asking "do you trust a spreadsheet where the math is done by a computer and not verified by a human".

At some point in history... the answer would be "no way I'd trust numbers not checked by a human".

Today? It's easy to say we can trust software produced numbers.

The question becomes what is that cross over point?

Are you saying you don't think we'll get to a point where computers drive better than humans? I think we're closer to that point than you think and with defensive programming we can do so safely.

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