Honestly, if anything, this is probably proof that self-driving is the future, as I would bet any human would've most definitely done much worse in the same scenario.
How many similar (and others) accidents are being prevented by human drivers daily, and no one knows about them, at all? We just don't know.
That's why I take any stats of "human vs AI" driving with a grain of salt.
I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat.
Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's not really the right way to think about it anyways.
If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous.
You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't be counted the same.
https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver...
This page is confused about the difference between mean and median. The 88% of drivers who think they are above average are not necessarily correct, but there would be nothing logically inconsistent about them being correct.
It still does not make you a good driver. I've personally been in situations where I'm on the right lane, going slightly below the speed limit, when the vehicle (usually a pickup truck) passes me from the shoulder on the right, often blaring it's horns in disapproval as if they were on their way to save lives.
> Rules for Using the Shoulder. The laws for using a shoulder vary in each state, but it is illegal in all states to use the shoulder to bypass traffic or to pass another driver.
I can't wait to make it illegal for humans to drive on public roads.
Unfortunately, identifying people like GGP's mother and excluding them from requirement for self-driving is prohibitively expensive (and icky in all kinds of ways), and so would be predicting reckless driving behavior (approximately every driver is reckless at some point anyway, GGP's mom included). So it's all self-driving or no self-driving, and all self-driving is strictly better for all of us, even if GGP's mom has to briefly accept slightly elevated risk.
Not sure I follow the thinking here. We already have ability tests in driver's license exams.
Moreover, the requirement to receive a license is only to pass, not to pass "with flying colors".
I’m absolutely not convinced that an AI would fair better at handling a drunk driver’s driving style compared to a competent human. The statistics help AI due to them being good at handling monotony, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to safety in complex situations.
Impaired drivers (drink, drugs, sleep), bad drivers, dangerous drivers, etc. who ought to use the self-driving function are exactly the kinds of people who won't and continue to drive badly.
What this means is the safer drivers leave it off (because they outperform the system), while dangerous drivers also leave it off because they mistakenly believe they outperform the system. The traits that it's meant to protect people from are the very traits that ensure it can't do its job.
If people don't have to drive to thrive in society, we can make driving far more of a privilege. Contrast what a private pilot has to do to get certified.
This is surprising. Got a cite for that?
And if you get a bigger proportion of “good drivers” in autonomous cars than there is in the overall population, you're on fact increasing the overall number of accidents.
Maybe they should be.
This, and freeing up the streets from parked cars. If cars are self driving they can go park themselves into some big, far away car parks instead of clogging the streets. In europe it can easily multiply by 2 or 3 the throughput of most big cities.
In general south europe culture it is normal to drink wine to food, and enjoy it, but also embarrassing to get publically drunk.
Whereas in northern europe, though, it's all beer or spirits and the aim is to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.
These generalisations are based on my own observations. There's doubtless a lot of variation.
I like to say that the average human being has one testicle and half a vagina, which is not very representative of anyone around.
> On that note, the median and average are always within one standard deviation of another
Oh really? That's cool.
All models are wrong, only some of them are useful, and only when handled with care.
ummm. I would refrain from using nonparametric skew to make a comment about the magnitude of variance.
Essentially, the gap between mean and median will always be bounded by 1 sigma. The ratio abs(mean-median)/sigma is nonparametric skew. It is atmost 1, for any distribution( hence nonparametric, no distributional assumption required).
For unimodal distributions, especially symmetric unimodals, this ratio is 0. As the gap between the mean and median grows, the data gets more spread out, and the ratio captures that spread and consequent nonsymmetry. But you are using the value of this upper bound to make a comment about s^2. Which is very clever, but inaccurate. Say you standardize the rv and you have a nonsymmetric dist. Then mean 0, say median 100. Then stdev can be atmost 100, so variance can be atmost 10000. Which looks like “a lot of variance”. But is it really? Variance has a scaling problem, precisely why we take the square root, so the stdev remains in the scale of the mean. So at best one can say the stdev can be as big as the median. But that’s not very informative- because if the mean is -50 and median is +50, we are left with the same absolute gap of 100, so the same statement applies to the stdev even now.
I guess if I had to compare the variance of some sample X to another sample Y to make some claim that variance of X is much larger than Y, I would use a standard F test. Cooking up a test based on the gap between mean and median in a single sample seems somewhat shaky. It is very creative though, I grant you that.
This will still leave us with the random and dangerous behaviours of cyclists and motorcycles though.
It's similar for weather, self driving cars might refuse to operate in some weather conditions (I don't think it's by accident that most companies mainly operate in the relatively warm and sunny places of the US), human accidents under bad conditions are still part of the statistics.
And again drunk/impaired drivers also go into the statistics, if we disregard them and humans become safer, than this is not an argument that self driving is safer than humans, but an argument that there isn't enough enforcement around riving impaired.
This is extremely limited and really not relevant to the topic at hand. You've marginalized out the type of accidents. Most miles driven are on highways and this is a different environment than urban. The information you've marginalized out is essential for making reasonable conclusions about safety. It isn't important to just know the ratio of TP/TN/FP/FN but more specifically where and when these errors happen. The nuance is critical to this type of discussion and a simplification can actually cause you to make poor decisions that are in the wrong direction rather than naive decisions but in the correct direction.
Specifically "Framework for a conflict typology including causal factors for use in ADS safety evaluation" and "Comparison of Waymo Rider-Only Crash Data to Human Benchmarks at 7.1 Million Miles"
It may not surprise you to know that they have given a LOT of consideration to these factors and have built a complex model that addresses these to demonstrate their claims.
Comparisons should be made 1) with the median, not the average, and 2) under the same conditions.
The more restricted and environment controlled we can make it, the few accidents we see machine controlled cars do, and the worse a adaptive human driver does in comparison (barring extreme situations).
Speeding alone is a huge problem. I would take self driving cars even if far from perfect just because of it. It will be safer if they don't speed even if they sometimes randomly drive into other vehicles. Everything is secondary when it comes to safety. It really is obvious when you move from a place where people don't respect speed limits to one where they do. I think not speeding solves 95%+ of serious safety problems.
I'm not against Waymo.
(Also in Oz, rolling your car when you try to swerve to avoid a kangaroo is so common that you're normally taught to just break instead)
They don't, but: 1. Your perception is not perfect. 2. A truck passing you means there was a blind spot and you have no idea what was there. 3. There are areas with many lanes merging / splitting, where it takes most of your attention to know where you're going; little left to track everything around.
Tracking your surrounding is great. Accepting that you're going to make mistakes, adjusting for that and also allowing assistive tech is even better.
Also, if something potentially dangerous/important is happening to your left, you will focus your attention there and not be aware of things happening to your right, even if you normally would have seen those things had you been looking straight ahead.
I try to know what is going on around me, for the reason you describe (exit strategies), but I'm aware that sometimes I simply do not know what is to my left — and would not want to swerve there.
Having seen friends driving Teslas, I can see how the surround-view could be useful for situations like this. However, I have also seen that cars appear/vanish for no reason, and it is clearly not reliable at this point.
Swerving is not legal and it's not legal because you might hit something you can't see. On the other hand, an autonomous vehicle maintains perpetual 360° situational awareness so it already knows whether it's safe to swerve.
If I'm driving down the road and someone pushes a kid in front of my car, I'm very likely to swerve, even if I'm not 100% sure if there is someone next to me. If I hit a car next to me and cause damage/injure people, there is a good chance that a jury would find in my favor because a "reasonable person" (the relevant legal standard in a civil case) would seek to avoid the certain death of a faultless child, even if it means a chance of injury to passengers in a vehicle that might be nearby. I wouldn't swerve if I thought a bicyclist were there, but I would likely swerve into a vehicle, which affords occupants significant protection.
And I certainly would not be found guilty of a crime ("beyond a reasonable doubt", the standard in a criminal trial) because it is not criminally negligent to swerve when faced with the certainty of killing a child. Under the "defense of self/others" doctrine, you can do many things that would normally be illegal, if you are doing them to prevent the imminent death of yourself or someone else. (These analyses are not super detailed, but IAAL.)
The thing is... Neither are people. A kid darts out on front of you and you won't have time to make a conscious decision. The maneuver you make will be too fast for rational thought, and your brain will explain to itself why it did that later.
... Incidentally, this is one of the things that scares me about human drivers. Put a human on the stand to testify and most will say they never saw that kid, no matter what physical process happened to their eyes and neurons. I think most even actually believe it.
In any case, I'm glad that in this incident they'll be able to do a full NHTSA workup, pull logs, and reprogram the machine to avoid an accident like this in the future. Can't do that to a human driver.