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Comment by yk | Hacker News Reader

3/50 is I think a meaningless failure rate. If the system overlooks 3 out of every 50 pedestrians standing on the road by themselves and happily runs them over, then it is certainly unacceptable. If there is a test, in which the system is shown groups of pedestrians, in total 50 and it mistakes a group of 3 for a large immobile object, then it is probably acceptable, as long as it always labels pedestrians as 'do not run over.'

And for the entire fleet of autonomous cars, the system does not need to be safe. It just needs to be better than humans driving. Realistically to gain acceptance they would need to be an order of magnitude better, which translates to roughly 1 fatal accident per year per 10^5 self driving cars. The current numbers for the US are 36000 fatalities and 250M cars.

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> And for the entire fleet of autonomous cars, the system does not need to be safe. It just needs to be better than humans driving.

I really hope this is true. I really want self-driving cars everywhere, now. Road Traffic accidents kill very many people and this is an example of Google using money and smarts to do good.

But looking at the way people deal with risk makes me wary.

People drive cars all the time even though driving is a bit risky. People don't really understand how good or bad their own driving is. There's a bunch of cognitive biases and rationalisations.

I hope people who are experts in communications are ready to dispel the FUD backlash against self driving cars.

> But looking at the way people deal with risk makes me wary.

One of the problems is insurance. Right now, everyone needs to have insurance to drive. If I accidentally hit a pedestrian or rear-end another driver they can claim on my insurance.

Let's say that a software bug results in someone getting hit and injured by a self-driving car. Who's liable? I am not sure that this is FUD, so much as a genuine question. It is because driving is risky that drivers must have insurance. Presumably most people would want self-driving cars to be insured if there was a chance of failure (even planes, one of the safest forms of transport, get insured against crashing).

We could very well have a situation where cars self drive, but drivers are still expected to pay attention to the road and 'drive' to avoid liability.

I suspect there's going to be a lot of lobbying on both sides before mass deployment of self driving cars.

I think we have quite some experience with insuring unsupervised systems. After all, I am not supposed to supervise my coffee machine, but if it causes a fire then my insurance has to pay.

On the other hand, I think that the politics of self driving cars could get rather interesting, especially if widespread adoption is fast, say 5 years until a self driving car is no longer extraordinary and 10 years until one just assumes that a new car is self driving. Then I think we get a initial phase, were they are seen as modern. After this, when every single accident gets widely reported, I think it is possible that the public completely splits, on one hand the traditionalists, who maintain that only a human should drive. And on the other hand the people who say that self driving cars are safer than humans. And the laws will shift according to the relative strength of the two groups. ( With probably some rather ridiculous political compromises in between, perhaps you are allowed to read a newspaper, but not to drink coffee. )

> Let's say that a software bug results in someone getting hit and injured by a self-driving car. Who's liable?

The same person who is liable if your current car has a fault tomorrow that causes you to crash, presumably.

Insurance is an industry very much in need of disruption. If Google offered a monthly software license for a self driving car that also covered the insurance? That would be awesome, and many people would probably take them up on it.

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