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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

> You have to know what you're fixing first.

In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result.

Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.

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And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries.

Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone. Also they will probably save most of those lives once they become good.

The "least harm" approach is to scale autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible even if they do have accidents sometimes.

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions.

It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

I don't think we are better off putting Elon Musk behind every wheel.

Good thing no one is suggesting that

I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?

Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos).

I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story:

https://qntm.org/frame

This is a tradeoff, in which the original case might have been the less dangerous one.

Autonomous fleets have a major potential flaw too, in form of a malicious hacker gaining control over multiple vehicles at once and wreaking havoc.

Imagine if every model XY suddenly got a malicious OTA update and started actively chasing pedestrians.

Hm, so you would put a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as thousands of actual deaths caused by drunk drivers each year? 30% of us road fatalities involve a drunk driver each year...

I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen, and further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths if it did occur.

"I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen"

OK, so you are optimistic. My own specialization is encryption/security, so I am not. State actors can do such things, too, and we've already had a small wave of classical physical-world sabotages in Europe that everyone suspects Russia of.

"further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths"

This is something I can agree upon, but you have to take into account that human societies don't work on a purely arithmetic/statistical basis. Mass casualty events have their own political and cultural gravitas, doubly so if they were intentional.

Sinking of the Titanic shocked the whole world and it is still a frequent subject for artists 100 years later, even though 1500 deaths aren't objectively that many. I don't doubt that way more than 1500 people drowned in individual accidents worldwide in April 1912 alone, but the general public didn't care about those deaths.

And a terrorist attack with merely 3000 dead put the US on a war footing for more than a decade and made it spend a trillion dollars on military campaigns, even though drunk American drivers manage the same carnage in five months or so.

Because the baseline of human-operated safety is "get law enforcement to do their job of getting rid of the bad actors."

Why is that the baseline? Actual human performance as it exists today gives us tens of thousands of road fatalities per year in the US. We have not solved that problem despite decades of opportunity to introduce regulations and enforcement. Getting rid of human drivers looks like a very promising way forward.

Because failure to solve it is political and intellectual laziness and cowardice.

It's like jets falling out of the sky because the guy that bolts the wings on is only half doing his job, we can all see it and know about it and yet.. nobody wants to speak up.

At least some of them will likely still occur as those people may decide to override the robot drivers safer choices to save 30 seconds or have fun

There are ways, but our individualistic, consumerist, convenience-first society is reluctant to implement them - as, same as gun control, they're incompatible with certain notions of freedom.

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