6 ms·

And they'll actually be able to go full-speed on the highway, kill people (less than real drivers), but still continue on in development without massive public

by skj 11y ago

And they'll actually be able to go full-speed on the highway, kill people (less than real drivers), but still continue on in development without massive public outcry! I wonder, if someone could make a self-driving car that could pass a road test (including taking verbal instructions from the tester), would people be ok with that one being on the highways?

tiles 11y ago
I wonder if people would even show confidence knowing the difficulty of other drivers' road tests, given how easily they can vary based on instructor and region.
intopieces 11y ago
> kill people (less than real drivers) What does this mean?
- sebastianavina 11y ago
  in china, you can override the law without major consequences... some day, at full velocity a car will kill someone, and they will discover a bug, patch it , and keep life... in america that would mean a thousand million dollar lawsuit.
- Tuna-Fish 11y ago
  The moment you start mass-producing self-driving cars, people will start dying in accidents that were caused by them. Even if they are vastly safer than human drivers^+ , the sheer amount of cars on the highway and the varied situations they get in will mean that there will be accidents caused directly by bad decisions done by the computer. The legal system we have is a lot more lenient to human error than it is to other causes, and this is a major problem, because it means that even if going all AI cars would mean that we lower the fatality rate by 97%, that still means a thousand deaths a year that can be blamed on one company. That company could not possibly continue operating, even if they would be saving 29000 lives every year. I am generally not a fan of the Chinese government, but this is one way in which their system is better than ours. They have people in positions where they can do the math and decide that if some decision greatly saves lives on the net, they can enact it even if it directly causes (less) lives to be lost. ^+ And really, that isn't a hard goal to reach. People largely don't cause fatalities because they are bad at driving, they cause them because they are impaired in one way or another and because the reaction times at high speeds are too hard for humans. Most early AI cars will probably be shitty, but they will largely be shitty in ways that don't endanger the occupants.
  - JackFr 11y ago
    > but this is one way in which their system is better than ours. That is ludicrous. > They have people in positions where they can do the math and decide that if some decision greatly saves lives on the net, they can enact it even if it directly causes (less) lives to be lost. What you mean to say is they have people in positions where they can enact it, for any number of reasons . . . Let's hope the decider guy isn't the air quality monitor for Beijing.
  - karmacondon 11y ago
    I understand your argument, but I see two other possibilities: 1) Drivers remain liable for actions taken by their car's AI. This would encourage people to only use truly driverless AI in the safest possible conditions, ie not on crowded streets or when its raining. This will let market forces balance the technological development of the cars with public adoption 2) After initial legal precedents for damages are set, some companies will make enough money to insure a large fleet of autonomous vehicles. And again, market forces will be able to pace the tradeoff between how "safe" the AI technology is vs how quickly its adopted. tldr; an authoritarian government isn't necessary to push this particular technology forward. As much as I hate to say it, the Free Market will do just fine in this case
    - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
      In China, I'd assume that they would just go fleet and skip autonomous personal vehicles. Basically just taxis without drivers.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      If the AI is as good or better than a human driver your first point wont matter. You can't avoid accidents anyone who is driving a car on a daily basis will be involved in an accident involving another human being in one point or another (and I don't even count rush hour fender benders) that's just statistics. If driverless cars can improve those statistics they'll be used if only than to get lower insurance premiums in the end a company that can reduce the chance of you getting into an accident by even 10% would have every insurance company in the world behind them. I for one do not see a major legal battle or precedents especially not from places like China, smart cruise control and various other drive assist technologies (lane keeping, auto park etc.) have been around for about a decade and we still haven't had major cases around them and there is no way that say Toyota's auto park feature did not cause some accidents. Driverless or not as long as there is a driver in the car they are responsible for any liabilities as they have full control over the car even in drive assist mode (steering and breaking is always accessible to the driver) so unless there will be some major issue and that issue has to be that the AI actually prevented the driver from using the car controls I don't see any major legal issues arising. And by the time driverless cars become truly driverless as in Total Recall (the Schwarzenegger one) driveless insurance companies would find a solution for that just like they found a solution for human drivers. As long as it's an accident and the AI and all car systems were in working order the insurance will cover it if the car was not maintained properly then the owner of the service will be liable. This is pretty much how human driver coverage works, if you did nothing wrong, the car was maintained, and you weren't negligible (e.g. drunk driving, speeding, etc.) you are covered by your insurance in any other case you are on your own.
- afarrell 11y ago
  In the US, 32,719 died in 2013 from automobile crashes. Any wide-scale deployment of an automobile technology on public roads will mean that people die in crashes with car which have that technology.
  - marvy 11y ago
    That number alone proves nothing. You could try to say that "even if a self-driving car is a thousand times safer than the average human, that still leaves 32 deaths per year". But I don't buy that logic. You need a breakdown by cause. For instance: how many of those involved at least one person being drunk? Sleepy? Going above the speed limit? There are large classes of failure modes that self-driving cars are not prone to. Is it really too much to believe that some day we will have a civilization that can move people from place to place without killing anyone? I remain optimistic. But even if not, we can at least get this thing off the list of top k causes of death, for some integer k. Already it's responsible for less than two percent of US deaths. (source: wolfram alpha) A bit more work and we can move it onto lists like this instead: https://xkcd.com/369/ https://xkcd.com/369/
    - afarrell 11y ago
      > some day Yes, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow, we can deploy a technology that will decrease deaths but not to zero.
      - marvy 11y ago
        Fair enough. I'll settle for decreasing to non-zero for tomorrow :)
chvid 11y ago
Why do you think that?
- hueving 11y ago
  The general belief that public outcries are not allowed in China.
  - chvid 11y ago
    Sure that is the general belief. Free speech in China is limited compared to the west. Even though you can see public outcry comment on the factory explosion in Tianjin and the recent smog in Beijing. But what is mostly missing from the picture are the collosal improvements in public safety, pollution, health that has happened in the country over the past decades. These improvements are far larger than anything we have done in the west. And are a result of directed government policy. Why would the Chinese government allow self-driving cars that kills people just because it can censor Twitter?
    - skj 11y ago
      My point was that they would be saving lives by allowing driverless cars, since humans are more dangerous behind the wheel. And, because they can censor twitter (as an abbreviation for controlling propaganda) they can get away with it in a way the US could not.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
lumberjack 11y ago
What if careful drivers are less likely to be injured in a crash if self driving cars are not introduced, despite there being less overall road injuries? Would not these drivers' outcry be justified then?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Less injuries > more injuries. Less deaths > more deaths.
  - anilgulecha 11y ago
    Generally i think everyone would agree with your statement. However, the trolley problem is a though-experiment which shows that the argument is more nuanced (at-least psychologically). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem A TED talk on this as well: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_what_s_the_right_thing_to_do https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_what_s_the_right_th...
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Yes, like pretty much everything, this rule gets hairy when you zoom in on it enough. That's why, e.g., medicine has the concept of Quality-adjusted life years (QALY), to capture the intuition that it's better to live 10 years in perfect happiness than 15 years in agonizing pain, etc. However, I think the principle is generally sound, and if you oppose the option that would lead to less deaths, you have to show what society loses that's more important than the lives saved (and yes, it happens; for instance, car traffic in general is society trading some loss of lives for huge boost in convenience and economic prosperity).
      - progressive_dad 11y ago
        What society loses is an inefficient but largely accepted legal framework for compensation in the event of injury or death. This framework right now is balanced by individuals accepting culpability in the event of an accident. An individual has certain limitations to obtain and use legal leverage to evade financial responsibility. A massive lucrative corporation has far more leverage and interest in avoiding financial responsibility and you have shifted the obvious blame away from the individual. You've disrupted a finely honed set of checks and balances that enable global highway transit. What's needed is a big pot of money for the greater good, and that means government. Government means regulation. Regulation stifles innovation and adds overhead that scares away competition. And now you've got yourself a catch-22 that requires a company with a very specific set of parameters to achieve any progress. Which is what we've got.

by skj 11y ago

tiles 11y ago

I wonder if people would even show confidence knowing the difficulty of other drivers' road tests, given how easily they can vary based on instructor and region.

intopieces 11y ago

> kill people (less than real drivers) What does this mean?

sebastianavina 11y ago
in china, you can override the law without major consequences... some day, at full velocity a car will kill someone, and they will discover a bug, patch it , and keep life... in america that would mean a thousand million dollar lawsuit.
Tuna-Fish 11y ago
The moment you start mass-producing self-driving cars, people will start dying in accidents that were caused by them. Even if they are vastly safer than human drivers^+ , the sheer amount of cars on the highway and the varied situations they get in will mean that there will be accidents caused directly by bad decisions done by the computer. The legal system we have is a lot more lenient to human error than it is to other causes, and this is a major problem, because it means that even if going all AI cars would mean that we lower the fatality rate by 97%, that still means a thousand deaths a year that can be blamed on one company. That company could not possibly continue operating, even if they would be saving 29000 lives every year. I am generally not a fan of the Chinese government, but this is one way in which their system is better than ours. They have people in positions where they can do the math and decide that if some decision greatly saves lives on the net, they can enact it even if it directly causes (less) lives to be lost. ^+ And really, that isn't a hard goal to reach. People largely don't cause fatalities because they are bad at driving, they cause them because they are impaired in one way or another and because the reaction times at high speeds are too hard for humans. Most early AI cars will probably be shitty, but they will largely be shitty in ways that don't endanger the occupants.
- JackFr 11y ago
  > but this is one way in which their system is better than ours. That is ludicrous. > They have people in positions where they can do the math and decide that if some decision greatly saves lives on the net, they can enact it even if it directly causes (less) lives to be lost. What you mean to say is they have people in positions where they can enact it, for any number of reasons . . . Let's hope the decider guy isn't the air quality monitor for Beijing.
- karmacondon 11y ago
  I understand your argument, but I see two other possibilities: 1) Drivers remain liable for actions taken by their car's AI. This would encourage people to only use truly driverless AI in the safest possible conditions, ie not on crowded streets or when its raining. This will let market forces balance the technological development of the cars with public adoption 2) After initial legal precedents for damages are set, some companies will make enough money to insure a large fleet of autonomous vehicles. And again, market forces will be able to pace the tradeoff between how "safe" the AI technology is vs how quickly its adopted. tldr; an authoritarian government isn't necessary to push this particular technology forward. As much as I hate to say it, the Free Market will do just fine in this case
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    In China, I'd assume that they would just go fleet and skip autonomous personal vehicles. Basically just taxis without drivers.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    If the AI is as good or better than a human driver your first point wont matter. You can't avoid accidents anyone who is driving a car on a daily basis will be involved in an accident involving another human being in one point or another (and I don't even count rush hour fender benders) that's just statistics. If driverless cars can improve those statistics they'll be used if only than to get lower insurance premiums in the end a company that can reduce the chance of you getting into an accident by even 10% would have every insurance company in the world behind them. I for one do not see a major legal battle or precedents especially not from places like China, smart cruise control and various other drive assist technologies (lane keeping, auto park etc.) have been around for about a decade and we still haven't had major cases around them and there is no way that say Toyota's auto park feature did not cause some accidents. Driverless or not as long as there is a driver in the car they are responsible for any liabilities as they have full control over the car even in drive assist mode (steering and breaking is always accessible to the driver) so unless there will be some major issue and that issue has to be that the AI actually prevented the driver from using the car controls I don't see any major legal issues arising. And by the time driverless cars become truly driverless as in Total Recall (the Schwarzenegger one) driveless insurance companies would find a solution for that just like they found a solution for human drivers. As long as it's an accident and the AI and all car systems were in working order the insurance will cover it if the car was not maintained properly then the owner of the service will be liable. This is pretty much how human driver coverage works, if you did nothing wrong, the car was maintained, and you weren't negligible (e.g. drunk driving, speeding, etc.) you are covered by your insurance in any other case you are on your own.
afarrell 11y ago
In the US, 32,719 died in 2013 from automobile crashes. Any wide-scale deployment of an automobile technology on public roads will mean that people die in crashes with car which have that technology.
- marvy 11y ago
  That number alone proves nothing. You could try to say that "even if a self-driving car is a thousand times safer than the average human, that still leaves 32 deaths per year". But I don't buy that logic. You need a breakdown by cause. For instance: how many of those involved at least one person being drunk? Sleepy? Going above the speed limit? There are large classes of failure modes that self-driving cars are not prone to. Is it really too much to believe that some day we will have a civilization that can move people from place to place without killing anyone? I remain optimistic. But even if not, we can at least get this thing off the list of top k causes of death, for some integer k. Already it's responsible for less than two percent of US deaths. (source: wolfram alpha) A bit more work and we can move it onto lists like this instead: https://xkcd.com/369/ https://xkcd.com/369/
  - afarrell 11y ago
    > some day Yes, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow, we can deploy a technology that will decrease deaths but not to zero.
    - marvy 11y ago
      Fair enough. I'll settle for decreasing to non-zero for tomorrow :)

chvid 11y ago

Why do you think that?

hueving 11y ago
The general belief that public outcries are not allowed in China.
- chvid 11y ago
  Sure that is the general belief. Free speech in China is limited compared to the west. Even though you can see public outcry comment on the factory explosion in Tianjin and the recent smog in Beijing. But what is mostly missing from the picture are the collosal improvements in public safety, pollution, health that has happened in the country over the past decades. These improvements are far larger than anything we have done in the west. And are a result of directed government policy. Why would the Chinese government allow self-driving cars that kills people just because it can censor Twitter?
  - skj 11y ago
    My point was that they would be saving lives by allowing driverless cars, since humans are more dangerous behind the wheel. And, because they can censor twitter (as an abbreviation for controlling propaganda) they can get away with it in a way the US could not.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

lumberjack 11y ago

What if careful drivers are less likely to be injured in a crash if self driving cars are not introduced, despite there being less overall road injuries? Would not these drivers' outcry be justified then?

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Less injuries > more injuries. Less deaths > more deaths.
- anilgulecha 11y ago
  Generally i think everyone would agree with your statement. However, the trolley problem is a though-experiment which shows that the argument is more nuanced (at-least psychologically). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem A TED talk on this as well: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_what_s_the_right_thing_to_do https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_what_s_the_right_th...
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes, like pretty much everything, this rule gets hairy when you zoom in on it enough. That's why, e.g., medicine has the concept of Quality-adjusted life years (QALY), to capture the intuition that it's better to live 10 years in perfect happiness than 15 years in agonizing pain, etc. However, I think the principle is generally sound, and if you oppose the option that would lead to less deaths, you have to show what society loses that's more important than the lives saved (and yes, it happens; for instance, car traffic in general is society trading some loss of lives for huge boost in convenience and economic prosperity).
    - progressive_dad 11y ago
      What society loses is an inefficient but largely accepted legal framework for compensation in the event of injury or death. This framework right now is balanced by individuals accepting culpability in the event of an accident. An individual has certain limitations to obtain and use legal leverage to evade financial responsibility. A massive lucrative corporation has far more leverage and interest in avoiding financial responsibility and you have shifted the obvious blame away from the individual. You've disrupted a finely honed set of checks and balances that enable global highway transit. What's needed is a big pot of money for the greater good, and that means government. Government means regulation. Regulation stifles innovation and adds overhead that scares away competition. And now you've got yourself a catch-22 that requires a company with a very specific set of parameters to achieve any progress. Which is what we've got.