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Self driving cars don't have to be perfect. They just have to be safer then driving is today [1]. The real question is if society can handle the unfairness tha

Self driving cars don't have to be perfect. They just have to be safer then driving is today [1]. The real question is if society can handle the unfairness that is death by random software error vs. death by negligent driving. It's easy to blame negligent driving on the driver, we're clearly not negligent so it really doesn't effect us right? But a software error might as well be an act of god, it's something that might actually happen to me! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

llamataboot 11y ago
No because negligent driving doesn't just put the driver at risk - it puts everyone else on the road plus pedestrians at risk
- wefarrell 11y ago
  Exactly, negligent drivers don't just kill themselves and there is very little you can do to prevent one from killing you.
794CD01 11y ago
They don't have to be safer than driving is today. They can be significantly less safe while still being an improvement for society because drivers will be able to focus on other activities while travelling instead of wasting that time focusing on driving the car.
- Grambo 11y ago
  Actually they have to be significantly safer than driving today. People would rather be unsafe and in control than not in control and a tiny bit safer. I know personally if a self driving car could only drive as well as I could then I'd still want to be the one driving.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    People only have the illusion of safety when in control, and are also demonstrably incapable of judging their own ability to perform tasks. Your criterion won't be taken seriously by anyone involved in policy, because this is already well understood.
    - g8oz 11y ago
      At a certain point the policy question will inevitably be: why should any regular person be even allowed to drive given the superior abilities of the machines? There are certain ideological assumptions that will then have to be debated. Making your own mistakes is a consequence of freedom. Limiting the freedom to make mistakes for the overall benefit to society is not uncontroversial - (see the gun control debate), and contributes to alienation in the Marxist sense of the term. There is more than utility involved here. Just because the trade-off doesn't matter to techno-determinists doesn't mean it it doesn't exist.
      - greenleafjacob 11y ago
        Cars are already extremely regulated. You can only drive at speeds dictated by the government in directions dictated by the government, turn in ways prescribed by the government. Your car has to be identifiable in specific ways by the government. You have a lowered expectation of privacy in a car. I hardly think the argument will be difficult to just prohibit cars.
        tremon 11y ago
        You can only drive at speeds dictated by the government in directions dictated by the government, turn in ways prescribed by the government Sure... so you're saying that your steering wheel blocks when you're trying to make an uncharted turn? Or that your throttle has a variable hard limit, depending on the road you're on? Where do you live, if I may ask?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      While I agree with your first sentence, I think you're ignoring the fact that when media get wind of a case like this, it's almost only the irrational opinions of masses that matter. In western democracies, politics - and thus policies - is driven by pandering to the population (and bribes^Wlobbying).
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  There's psychological and game theoretic factors that the safety has to overcome in order to be acceptable. Part of why human drivers are allowed today is because the people who bear the cost of driving decisions are directly involved in making those decisions. Once you give up control to a third party, they need to be significantly better to make it an acceptable choice on the individual level. In other words, I agree that it's better for society, but that "better for society" isn't the metric that gets used for making decisions within the system.
  - amelius 11y ago
    > Part of why human drivers are allowed today is because the people who bear the cost of driving decisions are directly involved in making those decisions. This gives me weird visions of Google engineers with a necklace that explodes in the event that one of their cars causes an accident :S
    - amazon_not 11y ago
      I wonder if you've read Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton? Unremovable, remote controllable lethal necklaces are a central plot device in the mercenary invasion. They are put on randomly chosen civilians as "collateral" to ensure co-operation and disincentive insurgency.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      The difference there is that one person's mistake driving causes one accident. One person's mistake programming might cause a thousand.
  - makip 11y ago
    I see where you're going with this and I agree. A significant consideration is whether owners of self driving cars will have the right to make code modifications to their vehicles. Captured aptly here by Cory Doctrow. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/the-problem-with-self-driving-cars-who-controls-the-code https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/the-probl... Edit: salient quotes from the article: "Here’s a different way of thinking about [the trolley] problem: if you wanted to design a car that intentionally murdered its driver under certain circumstances, how would you make sure that the driver never altered its programming so that they could be assured that their property would never intentionally murder them?" "If self-driving cars can only be safe if we are sure no one can reconfigure them without manufacturer approval, then they will never be safe." "Your relationship to the car you ride in, but do not own, makes all the problems mentioned even harder."
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
xanderjanz 11y ago
I imagine we'd treat it like we do getting hit by a drunk driver. Vilify reckless programmers, and don't think about it.
- deegles 11y ago
  This would have a dramatic chilling effect on hiring for self-driving car software developers, which would ironically make them less safe.
  - lallysingh 11y ago
    It might lead to some decent work on formal verification of programs.
    - iopq 11y ago
      The problem is that perfectly-working software can easily get you in an accident. "Well, the bus didn't yield, and the programming said it would" It's not quite possible to write a car that avoids ALL accidents because a car has a speed and a turning radius and breaks only work so fast.
      - ben_jones 11y ago
        Still would be nice if the software could go "shit I'm about to get into an accident" and deploy air bags etc. that much faster. Plus now that I'm thinking about it, most accidents probably occur with some option that, had it been utilized, would've prevented the incident. Imagine the insane accident-avoiding swerve maneuvers a software program could potentially pull off.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        > It's not quite possible to write a car that avoids ALL accidents because a car has a speed and a turning radius and breaks only work so fast. It's not possible to have a self-driving car avoid all accidents, but one can presumably get pretty close. The realtime data from sensors give you enough information about the car itself, its surroundings and other objects around it to continuously compute a safety envelope - a subspace of the phase space of controllable parameters (like input, steering) within which the car can stop safely - and then make one of the goals to aggressively steer the car to remain in that envelope. This approach should be able to automagically handle things like safe driving distances or pedestrians suddenly running into the street. Of course there will be a lot of details to account for when implementing this software, but it's important to realize that we have enough computing power to let the car continuously have every possible backup plan for almost any contingency in its electronic brain.
gliderShip 11y ago
Well No, There is an upper limit on the damage a bad driver can do by say crushing his car with a bus or something like that. Imagine a bug or malware triggered at the same moment world-wide. It could kill millions. So it not as simple as 'It just has to be better than a human'
- Benjammer 11y ago
  If a bug can kill millions then it's not "better than a human" though, right?
  - darawk 11y ago
    Depends on how unlikely that bug is :) probability x value, etc.
  - sriram_sun 11y ago
    Car manufacturers conduct recalls all the time. There might be the possibility that a million self-driving cars will be held hostage from a remote control tower simultaneously leading to injury or death to millions. However, in practice, as soon as an issue is discovered, there will be the equivalent of recalls (remote updates) and things like this will be fixed. People who are uncomfortable with self driving cars will always be able to drive manually or override the automated controls. At some point, technology will progress enough that the benefits will outweigh the risks and people will adopt.
    - xiphias 11y ago
      People won't be able to override a buggy software: they can't even do that now, just look at the remote Audi and BMW hacks that can brake the car on the highway.
      - seanp2k2 11y ago
        Or the jeep: https://blog.kaspersky.com/blackhat-jeep-cherokee-hack-explained/9493/ https://blog.kaspersky.com/blackhat-jeep-cherokee-hack-expla... Auto mfgs seem to be about 20-30 years behind when it comes to computers. Not really surprising that Tesla is whomping them on this front, given how SV people are scrambling to work there. You don't see that with the Big 3 or really any other car mfg.
eslaught 11y ago
That assumes that failures are uncorrelated. My personal concern is with correlated failures, like those that occurred in GCE. What if cars from some manufacturer all fail simultaneously in the same way (say, because of a software push that rolled out more aggressively than it just have, just as in the GCE case)? That's the sort of scenario I'm really concerned about. At least with human drivers, the failures are generally uncorrelated.
SubuSS 11y ago
I think the bigger worry is not the perfection part: It is the uniformity part. Considering software will be replicated (ignoring the ML ways of driving for now), updated and refreshed en masse, the impact is going to be very severe. A single nut case shoots up one school or his neighbors. The whole world turning into nut cases is going to be a walking dead scenario. We see this ALL the time with ALL the big companies including the ones I have worked for in the past. I am very interested in possible solutions people are cooking up here.
amelius 11y ago
> Self driving cars don't have to be perfect. They just have to be safer then driving is today But how is Google or any other manufacturer going to test their software updates? Are they going to test-drive their cars for tens of thousands of miles over and over again for every little update?
- cowardlydragon 11y ago
  OR you group a set of changes into say... a numbered RELEASE and THEN integration/user acceptance test it. I thought programmers were on here :-)
- agildehaus 11y ago
  Google's cars drive millions of miles daily in simulation already. They take sensor data (including LIDAR) from past drives and essentially redrive their entire dataset with the updated software. Here's Google talking about it: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-0116.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en... Of course this is only one component to feeling confident about pushing out an update where lives are on the line, but it's a key component.
  - kevindqc 11y ago
    But if a new update changes how the car drives, wouldn't the data that would've been captured by the updated car be different than what the old outdated car recorded? For example if the new update makes the car more aggressive, then other real drivers might be more careful, slow down more, etc compared to the original runs?
    - agildehaus 11y ago
      I'd assume the more severe the change the more they'd want to test in the real world. And that once a comfortable self-driving experience is found, Google will not want to change it much.
Fiahil 11y ago
As you say, it can be pretty difficult to accept the unfairness of death by random software error. However, this is a situation that already exist today, but understood and acknowledged by a very small portion of people in our societies. For (a non life-threatening) example, thanks to the post-mortem above, we have a pretty deep understanding of what happened and why during this outage; but for some people it could have been a mere "Spotify is down, again, no more music :(". I'm very curious to see if our understanding (as a society) of our own technology will improve over time or if people will continue to blame the internet for "not working" 20 years from now.
flippyhead 11y ago
Yeah and it's funny how people seem to have some level of tolerance for death-by-design-flaws-in–hardware but somehow, software is a different kind of engineering endeavor. My guess is this will persist for some time, but eventually even out.
pyre 11y ago
Well, this bug took down the entire system. What happens when self-driving software hits a similar bug? I don't think that there is any precedent for that sort of thing with manually driven cars. The scale could easily be larger than 100-car pile-ups due to poor weather conditions.
- Bjartr 11y ago
  >I don't think that there is any precedent for that sort of thing with manually driven cars. A stroke or heart attack while driving?
  - jschmitz28 11y ago
    That would only affect the person who had a stroke or heart attack and their close vicinity. The parent is suggesting a scenario where the manual driving equivalent would be every single driver getting a stroke or heart attack at the same time.
  - pyre 11y ago
    A stroke or heart attack while driving has (possibly) nationwide or worldwide reach? I somehow don't think you understand what I'm getting at. A "Perfect Storm" of bugs could cause a systemic failure that has the possibility to affect all cars everywhere (well, probably limited to a single car-maker / model / etc). This has the possibility to affect millions. Claiming that a stroke or heart attack while driving has the possibility of a similar scope / reach doesn't make sense.
    - Bjartr 11y ago
      AFAIK, because most new cars today are pretty close to drive-by-wire anyway, there's little if anything that exists today that precludes such a perfect storm scenario from occurring with the ECUs in human driven vehicles today other than whatever internal processes manufacturers happen to have in place to avoid ECU bugs. So in that respect, the introduction of self-driving-cars won't necessarily make such events more likely.
tambourine_man 11y ago
There's also the ethical problem of life and death choices that will have to programmed in advance. When an accident is inevitable, software will decide if prived or public property should be prioritized, which action is more likely to to protect driver/passenger A in detriment of driver/passenger B, etc. Most people wouldn't blame the outcome of a split second decision made in heat of the moment but would take issue when the action is deliberate. Interesting times we live in
harryf 11y ago
> The real question is if society can handle the unfairness that is death by random software error vs. death by negligent driving. Most people have a greater fear of flying than driving by car although statistically you're far more at risk in a car. One cause of that fear of flying is loss of control; you have to accept placing your life in someone else's hands. With self driving cars suspect lack of control will also be a problem. Either we need to provide passengers with some vestige of control to keep them busy or we just wait a generation until people get used to it
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  > Most people have a greater fear of flying than driving by car although statistically you're far more at risk in a car. One cause of that fear of flying is loss of control; you have to accept placing your life in someone else's hands. Really? That sounds counter intuitive. You'd think the reason people are afraid of flying is, because, you know, it's flying. Thirty thousand feet between you and the cold, hard ground. That's a long fall of agony to utmost certain death, and some magic turbo voodoo keeping you from it. Would people with fear of flying really rather be the pilot?
  - __jal 11y ago
    Can't find it with a quick google now, but there was a study on this. Giving people fake controls, even when they knew they were fake, reduced anxiety. Give ambulatory meat some onboard decision-making ability, and it will want to use it.
    - nothrabannosir 11y ago
      That's incredible! I would never have guessed. I stand corrected, thank you.
      - harryf 11y ago
        If you want to see the problem practice, here's someone's mother trying out the Tesla self-drive... http://mirror.ninja/sniz http://mirror.ninja/sniz

llamataboot 11y ago

No because negligent driving doesn't just put the driver at risk - it puts everyone else on the road plus pedestrians at risk

wefarrell 11y ago
Exactly, negligent drivers don't just kill themselves and there is very little you can do to prevent one from killing you.

794CD01 11y ago

They don't have to be safer than driving is today. They can be significantly less safe while still being an improvement for society because drivers will be able to focus on other activities while travelling instead of wasting that time focusing on driving the car.

Grambo 11y ago
Actually they have to be significantly safer than driving today. People would rather be unsafe and in control than not in control and a tiny bit safer. I know personally if a self driving car could only drive as well as I could then I'd still want to be the one driving.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  People only have the illusion of safety when in control, and are also demonstrably incapable of judging their own ability to perform tasks. Your criterion won't be taken seriously by anyone involved in policy, because this is already well understood.
  - g8oz 11y ago
    At a certain point the policy question will inevitably be: why should any regular person be even allowed to drive given the superior abilities of the machines? There are certain ideological assumptions that will then have to be debated. Making your own mistakes is a consequence of freedom. Limiting the freedom to make mistakes for the overall benefit to society is not uncontroversial - (see the gun control debate), and contributes to alienation in the Marxist sense of the term. There is more than utility involved here. Just because the trade-off doesn't matter to techno-determinists doesn't mean it it doesn't exist.
    - greenleafjacob 11y ago
      Cars are already extremely regulated. You can only drive at speeds dictated by the government in directions dictated by the government, turn in ways prescribed by the government. Your car has to be identifiable in specific ways by the government. You have a lowered expectation of privacy in a car. I hardly think the argument will be difficult to just prohibit cars.
      - tremon 11y ago
        You can only drive at speeds dictated by the government in directions dictated by the government, turn in ways prescribed by the government Sure... so you're saying that your steering wheel blocks when you're trying to make an uncharted turn? Or that your throttle has a variable hard limit, depending on the road you're on? Where do you live, if I may ask?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    While I agree with your first sentence, I think you're ignoring the fact that when media get wind of a case like this, it's almost only the irrational opinions of masses that matter. In western democracies, politics - and thus policies - is driven by pandering to the population (and bribes^Wlobbying).
ThrustVectoring 11y ago
There's psychological and game theoretic factors that the safety has to overcome in order to be acceptable. Part of why human drivers are allowed today is because the people who bear the cost of driving decisions are directly involved in making those decisions. Once you give up control to a third party, they need to be significantly better to make it an acceptable choice on the individual level. In other words, I agree that it's better for society, but that "better for society" isn't the metric that gets used for making decisions within the system.
- amelius 11y ago
  > Part of why human drivers are allowed today is because the people who bear the cost of driving decisions are directly involved in making those decisions. This gives me weird visions of Google engineers with a necklace that explodes in the event that one of their cars causes an accident :S
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    I wonder if you've read Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton? Unremovable, remote controllable lethal necklaces are a central plot device in the mercenary invasion. They are put on randomly chosen civilians as "collateral" to ensure co-operation and disincentive insurgency.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    The difference there is that one person's mistake driving causes one accident. One person's mistake programming might cause a thousand.
- makip 11y ago
  I see where you're going with this and I agree. A significant consideration is whether owners of self driving cars will have the right to make code modifications to their vehicles. Captured aptly here by Cory Doctrow. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/the-problem-with-self-driving-cars-who-controls-the-code https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/the-probl... Edit: salient quotes from the article: "Here’s a different way of thinking about [the trolley] problem: if you wanted to design a car that intentionally murdered its driver under certain circumstances, how would you make sure that the driver never altered its programming so that they could be assured that their property would never intentionally murder them?" "If self-driving cars can only be safe if we are sure no one can reconfigure them without manufacturer approval, then they will never be safe." "Your relationship to the car you ride in, but do not own, makes all the problems mentioned even harder."

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

xanderjanz 11y ago

I imagine we'd treat it like we do getting hit by a drunk driver. Vilify reckless programmers, and don't think about it.

deegles 11y ago
This would have a dramatic chilling effect on hiring for self-driving car software developers, which would ironically make them less safe.
- lallysingh 11y ago
  It might lead to some decent work on formal verification of programs.
  - iopq 11y ago
    The problem is that perfectly-working software can easily get you in an accident. "Well, the bus didn't yield, and the programming said it would" It's not quite possible to write a car that avoids ALL accidents because a car has a speed and a turning radius and breaks only work so fast.
    - ben_jones 11y ago
      Still would be nice if the software could go "shit I'm about to get into an accident" and deploy air bags etc. that much faster. Plus now that I'm thinking about it, most accidents probably occur with some option that, had it been utilized, would've prevented the incident. Imagine the insane accident-avoiding swerve maneuvers a software program could potentially pull off.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > It's not quite possible to write a car that avoids ALL accidents because a car has a speed and a turning radius and breaks only work so fast. It's not possible to have a self-driving car avoid all accidents, but one can presumably get pretty close. The realtime data from sensors give you enough information about the car itself, its surroundings and other objects around it to continuously compute a safety envelope - a subspace of the phase space of controllable parameters (like input, steering) within which the car can stop safely - and then make one of the goals to aggressively steer the car to remain in that envelope. This approach should be able to automagically handle things like safe driving distances or pedestrians suddenly running into the street. Of course there will be a lot of details to account for when implementing this software, but it's important to realize that we have enough computing power to let the car continuously have every possible backup plan for almost any contingency in its electronic brain.

gliderShip 11y ago

Well No, There is an upper limit on the damage a bad driver can do by say crushing his car with a bus or something like that. Imagine a bug or malware triggered at the same moment world-wide. It could kill millions. So it not as simple as 'It just has to be better than a human'

Benjammer 11y ago
If a bug can kill millions then it's not "better than a human" though, right?
- darawk 11y ago
  Depends on how unlikely that bug is :) probability x value, etc.
- sriram_sun 11y ago
  Car manufacturers conduct recalls all the time. There might be the possibility that a million self-driving cars will be held hostage from a remote control tower simultaneously leading to injury or death to millions. However, in practice, as soon as an issue is discovered, there will be the equivalent of recalls (remote updates) and things like this will be fixed. People who are uncomfortable with self driving cars will always be able to drive manually or override the automated controls. At some point, technology will progress enough that the benefits will outweigh the risks and people will adopt.
  - xiphias 11y ago
    People won't be able to override a buggy software: they can't even do that now, just look at the remote Audi and BMW hacks that can brake the car on the highway.
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      Or the jeep: https://blog.kaspersky.com/blackhat-jeep-cherokee-hack-explained/9493/ https://blog.kaspersky.com/blackhat-jeep-cherokee-hack-expla... Auto mfgs seem to be about 20-30 years behind when it comes to computers. Not really surprising that Tesla is whomping them on this front, given how SV people are scrambling to work there. You don't see that with the Big 3 or really any other car mfg.

eslaught 11y ago

That assumes that failures are uncorrelated. My personal concern is with correlated failures, like those that occurred in GCE. What if cars from some manufacturer all fail simultaneously in the same way (say, because of a software push that rolled out more aggressively than it just have, just as in the GCE case)? That's the sort of scenario I'm really concerned about. At least with human drivers, the failures are generally uncorrelated.

SubuSS 11y ago

I think the bigger worry is not the perfection part: It is the uniformity part. Considering software will be replicated (ignoring the ML ways of driving for now), updated and refreshed en masse, the impact is going to be very severe. A single nut case shoots up one school or his neighbors. The whole world turning into nut cases is going to be a walking dead scenario. We see this ALL the time with ALL the big companies including the ones I have worked for in the past. I am very interested in possible solutions people are cooking up here.

amelius 11y ago

> Self driving cars don't have to be perfect. They just have to be safer then driving is today But how is Google or any other manufacturer going to test their software updates? Are they going to test-drive their cars for tens of thousands of miles over and over again for every little update?

cowardlydragon 11y ago
OR you group a set of changes into say... a numbered RELEASE and THEN integration/user acceptance test it. I thought programmers were on here :-)
agildehaus 11y ago
Google's cars drive millions of miles daily in simulation already. They take sensor data (including LIDAR) from past drives and essentially redrive their entire dataset with the updated software. Here's Google talking about it: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-0116.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en... Of course this is only one component to feeling confident about pushing out an update where lives are on the line, but it's a key component.
- kevindqc 11y ago
  But if a new update changes how the car drives, wouldn't the data that would've been captured by the updated car be different than what the old outdated car recorded? For example if the new update makes the car more aggressive, then other real drivers might be more careful, slow down more, etc compared to the original runs?
  - agildehaus 11y ago
    I'd assume the more severe the change the more they'd want to test in the real world. And that once a comfortable self-driving experience is found, Google will not want to change it much.

Fiahil 11y ago

As you say, it can be pretty difficult to accept the unfairness of death by random software error. However, this is a situation that already exist today, but understood and acknowledged by a very small portion of people in our societies. For (a non life-threatening) example, thanks to the post-mortem above, we have a pretty deep understanding of what happened and why during this outage; but for some people it could have been a mere "Spotify is down, again, no more music :(". I'm very curious to see if our understanding (as a society) of our own technology will improve over time or if people will continue to blame the internet for "not working" 20 years from now.

flippyhead 11y ago

Yeah and it's funny how people seem to have some level of tolerance for death-by-design-flaws-in–hardware but somehow, software is a different kind of engineering endeavor. My guess is this will persist for some time, but eventually even out.

pyre 11y ago

Well, this bug took down the entire system. What happens when self-driving software hits a similar bug? I don't think that there is any precedent for that sort of thing with manually driven cars. The scale could easily be larger than 100-car pile-ups due to poor weather conditions.

Bjartr 11y ago
>I don't think that there is any precedent for that sort of thing with manually driven cars. A stroke or heart attack while driving?
- jschmitz28 11y ago
  That would only affect the person who had a stroke or heart attack and their close vicinity. The parent is suggesting a scenario where the manual driving equivalent would be every single driver getting a stroke or heart attack at the same time.
- pyre 11y ago
  A stroke or heart attack while driving has (possibly) nationwide or worldwide reach? I somehow don't think you understand what I'm getting at. A "Perfect Storm" of bugs could cause a systemic failure that has the possibility to affect all cars everywhere (well, probably limited to a single car-maker / model / etc). This has the possibility to affect millions. Claiming that a stroke or heart attack while driving has the possibility of a similar scope / reach doesn't make sense.
  - Bjartr 11y ago
    AFAIK, because most new cars today are pretty close to drive-by-wire anyway, there's little if anything that exists today that precludes such a perfect storm scenario from occurring with the ECUs in human driven vehicles today other than whatever internal processes manufacturers happen to have in place to avoid ECU bugs. So in that respect, the introduction of self-driving-cars won't necessarily make such events more likely.

tambourine_man 11y ago

There's also the ethical problem of life and death choices that will have to programmed in advance. When an accident is inevitable, software will decide if prived or public property should be prioritized, which action is more likely to to protect driver/passenger A in detriment of driver/passenger B, etc. Most people wouldn't blame the outcome of a split second decision made in heat of the moment but would take issue when the action is deliberate. Interesting times we live in

harryf 11y ago

> The real question is if society can handle the unfairness that is death by random software error vs. death by negligent driving. Most people have a greater fear of flying than driving by car although statistically you're far more at risk in a car. One cause of that fear of flying is loss of control; you have to accept placing your life in someone else's hands. With self driving cars suspect lack of control will also be a problem. Either we need to provide passengers with some vestige of control to keep them busy or we just wait a generation until people get used to it

nothrabannosir 11y ago
> Most people have a greater fear of flying than driving by car although statistically you're far more at risk in a car. One cause of that fear of flying is loss of control; you have to accept placing your life in someone else's hands. Really? That sounds counter intuitive. You'd think the reason people are afraid of flying is, because, you know, it's flying. Thirty thousand feet between you and the cold, hard ground. That's a long fall of agony to utmost certain death, and some magic turbo voodoo keeping you from it. Would people with fear of flying really rather be the pilot?
- __jal 11y ago
  Can't find it with a quick google now, but there was a study on this. Giving people fake controls, even when they knew they were fake, reduced anxiety. Give ambulatory meat some onboard decision-making ability, and it will want to use it.
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    That's incredible! I would never have guessed. I stand corrected, thank you.
    - harryf 11y ago
      If you want to see the problem practice, here's someone's mother trying out the Tesla self-drive... http://mirror.ninja/sniz http://mirror.ninja/sniz