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Comment by free2rhyme214 | Hacker News Reader

Do you trust software with your life?

Obviously 2025 software will be better than 2015 software but this question will still have to be answered strongly for mainstream adoption.

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We already trust software with our lives. Transit, medicine, navigation, finance. People have died because of software failure in the past, but it hasn't deterred adoption or advancement.

True. Then it depends on how fast Google & the car companies advance in this category.

Agreed. I'm not ready to embrace driverless cars yet myself, either, but in the long run automation probably increases safety. It's a bit of a callous view, but software mistakes can be fixed and ironed out - human mistakes are harder to fix. We've known for decades the dangers of, say, drunk driving yet it still happens.

The point is that you won't have to 'embrace' them, it's pretty easy to create an existence proof that they are 100x safer than human cars. Over time, build a fleet of them, and unleash them onto the roads and iterate for as long as it takes to get statistically significant data. If you have the pockets of Google it's pretty evident to me that by the time you have humans sitting in these things saying they are unsafe will be like denying climate change.

Do you trust people with your life?

I do understand your point, but I think a lot of people would trust software over a completely unknown person behind the wheel.

I think a lot of people would trust people over a completely disembodied piece of software with no skin in the game.

Drivers are careful because of others, but also because they too will suffer in an accident.

As one of my teachers used to joke: 'If you want to see an enormous improvement in the accident rate put a very sharp stainless steel spike on the steering wheel and remove the seatbelt from the drivers seat'.

The first autonomous vehicle crash will make international news. People don't like new things, even if they are safer overall. The first Tesla fire caused a panic, even though they are safer than gasoline cars.

Do you trust people?

Youtube is full of human examples - start here as an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ - and note that it ranges from minor fender benders through some very serious injuries and destruction.

There are lots of examples of not being able to stay in lane, pulling out, not seeing stopped traffic, not paying attention to surroundings. Humans can't even get the trivial simple things right in broad daylight.

A 9/11 of deaths happen on US roads every month.

> Do you trust software with your life?

That depends on what the alternative is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

There is already a ton of software in your car that can theoretically just steer in the other direction and accelerate.

Not cars made in 1999.

Coincidentally, the capital of my country has just banned those :)

Regardless, how many cars without software do you think there will be by 2025?

There are other drivers. You're on the road with cars that are substantially driven by software... You're still trusting your life to software.

One word... Pacemaker. Many people trust their lives to software running on their pacemaker. What is your real point here?

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