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Comment by thewanderer1983 | Hacker News Reader

thewanderer1983

Do you know how humans run stop lights and kill people, how does it compare?

Humans can go to prison [1], and depending on the state there are specific vehicular homicide laws or they are could be charged under normal homicide laws, specific statutes exist because vehicular laws can have higher punishment than typical negligence/reckless standards.

In California the charge can be anything from vehicular manslaughter to second degree murder, that means 15 years-to-life without parole, depending on other factors such prior(murder) convictions or if the victim is a peace officer and so forth.

In comparison self-driving systems do not have any punishment mechanism in the penal code. There is not even a well established liability standard, or ban/suspension threshold or any regulatory body equipped to audit a self driving system specifically [2]

[1] if found guilty - we may disagree on the mechanisms, effectiveness ,conviction rate and other details, nonetheless there is enforcement and there are going people in prison for this type of crime everyday.

[2] yes NTSB can do investigations but only for accidents (and give recommendations) and also has just 400 employees and $150M budget to cover everything from aviation to marine or pipeline and rail accidents.

Oh good. I may be put at unnecessary risk because people have higher standards for automation, but at least the guy who killed me will go to jail, maybe.

If safety is the objective we should be prioritizing public transit(automated even better) and not discussing agent/human driving a personal vehicle, here we value freedom[1] over safety, my comment is only a reflection of that ethos.

[1]Whether we like it or not individual freedom reflects in everything from gun safety(unique in the developed world) to the state of public transport in the richest country in the world.

We could do both. We can make cars safer and push on public transit.

But they don't. Thousands of people are being killed at intersections, yet unless there is some proven intent, it's extremely rare to go to jail.

Maybe this might be valid if this was a realistic thing and every bad driver who pulls out of a side street and kills someone suffers serious consequences, but they don't and it's not.

You are talking about enforcement. I am saying there are no AI laws on books, there is no established liability for the self driving software developer, the liability is still to the driver solely and completely.

First lets have those laws and regulations for AI and we can THEN talk about conviction rates for humans(or agents) and effectiveness of enforcement.

Right now human and agents are in two different leagues of enforcement civil and criminal, so they cannot be compared and agents should be held to much higher standard than humans until that changes.

self driving is safer than human driving, why should we apply urgent attention to AI driver safety. Human drivers are killing hundreds of people daily.

You're right, we should ban cars.

Their point, presumably, was that we shouldnt be anti-tech but we have to compare the statistics.

Their point is whataboutism to somehow defend autonomous deaths as acceptable.

I think, pragmatically, we have to accept that death is the outcome for us all, and trending towards fewer avoidable deaths and longer fuller lives is approximately the aim. Nonetheless deaths from a technology is inevitable.

I believe what you're trying to talk about are excess deaths when a technology is less capable than the incumbent? I'm not sure the stats, but I'd suspect FSD is already superior to the often distracted, sometimes drunk, phone in hand driver that is the norm today.

If chatgpt is to be trusted, Waymo and Tesla FSD are already massively safer than human drivers.

For the haters: https://spectrum.ieee.org/are-self-driving-cars-safe

It’s not whataboutism when you’re comparing the exact same actions and the two things can be substituted for each other.

Whataboutism is “how dare you complain about our gulags when you treat your black people like slaves.” It is not “our system kills people but it kills fewer people than what we currently have.” Especially when killing people is a result of being on the bleeding edge of what’s possible rather than being a deliberate choice to hurt people.

It's not 'whataboutism'. It's an identical situation, and the statistics relate to the same events.

In many jurisdictions you can run people over and kill them and as long it was a normal lapse in judgement or mistake they cannot charge you.

Only if you intentionally drive recklessly, for example speeding and racing, is it easy to charge a driver for manslaughter.

At least we can hold them directly accountable by the law.

We hold the driver accountable.

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