Hacker News Reader

Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

> I'm confident that once driverless cars are good enough, blind pedestrians will be far safer

I can’t reconcile the industry’s assertion that safety is the penultimate objective with our testing these things, uncontrolled, in densely populated urban areas.

View on HN

At some basic level it will always just be about profit. Their safety “just” needs to be good enough to not get shut down. Cynically, talk of drunk drivers etc., is marketing to sell the story to regulators and the public.

More optimistically, at least it’s possible to diagnose these mistakes and work to mitigate them. The fact that we could now start treating auto collisions as seriously as plane incidents might be reason to hope.

Money may be the medium of business— it’s how resources get distributed and how businesses gauge their success— but the primary structure of our society is humanity, not money. The way businesses or any other entity affects people is the only measure we should use to judge their usefulness and appropriateness of their behavior. That might be complicated to assess, but “oh well, you know, money” strikes me as the wrong place to land. While it may seem quaint to many, i won’t accept that some powerful group’s pursuit of wealth is more important than any non-wealthy person’s right to not get mangled by a pseudo-sentient taxi driver robot. If that’s the way it works out, as it obviously has, I’m pretty sure we should concentrate on making things closer to the way they should be rather than bemoaning the way things are.

Waymo tested for years in sparsely populated desert suburbs before expanding to SF.

The main criticism has always been that they were developing at a glacial pace.

What alternative path to deployment would you propose?

Development at a glacial pace. Their product timeline and finances are not my concern, and it’s not everybody else’s responsibility to mitigate the risks of their product development. Lots of things in industry would develop much more quickly if we decided to set the product safety bar low enough— I’m glad we at least recognize when we screwed up by taking away the operating licenses of companies like this. What happened here was exactly what I envisioned happening when the slick, CYA-first, blame-everyone-else, ethics-are-negotiable attitude endemic to the software (and other) industries entered this safety-critical field. The Therac-25 fried multiple people before the industry acknowledged enough culpability to trash a design that would never have been released if they had used proper design and engineering discipline in the first place. It was just a whole lot cheaper to let a developer check his own work and blame everyone else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com