Comment by marcusverus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcusverus | Hacker News Reader

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You can't compare autonomous systems that drive hundreds of thousands of vehicles to a single person. You have to compare it to hundreds of thousands of people.

American drivers kill ~100 people every day behind the wheel of a car. If autonomy were 50% safer and was deployed at such scale that it replaced 50% of all hours driven it would save 25 lives every day. It would also kill 25 people every day.

Sadly, many people will clutch their pearls at inevitable headlines like Bloodthirsty Elon Sacrifices 25 Innocents on the Altar of Profit Every Day! and, their emotions sufficiently primed, they will happily pull the plug on autonomy, sending 25 people per day to their deaths and feeling great about themselves as they do it.

Ok, in my country, you actually get your license removed and jail time if you kill someone (usually 2 years, up to 10 if you're drinking).

Let's say Tesla kill 50% less than a human driver, I'd agree to give Tesla's board 50% of the sentence for each person autopilot kills. As an incentive to make the cars kill less.

Let's reformulate it as a railroad problem. In the proposed hypothetical, if you effectively ban self driving cars until they're literally flawless, 50 people per day will be killed by human drivers every day. If you pull the lever and allow imperfect-but-better-than-human self-driving, 25 people per day will be killed by by autonomous vehicles.

As a reference point, non-suicide gun-related deaths total ~45 people per day.

What moral principle could possibly justify not pulling the lever?

But, even as everyone talk about morality as an ideal, no one really cares about it (else the world would be very, very different). What most people care about is feeling that things are 'fair', at least the appearance of fairness. I guarantee you that if a company accepts that it's board (or executives) get jailed if their car makes a mistake that kills someone, like any random driver, people will accept it.

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