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This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread: It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in t

This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread: It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars, to the point of pre-emptively expressing disdain at ordinary people reacting negatively to such news. I sense it's going to become harder and harder for us to talk about our worries and skepticism regarding automated driving, since the louder voices claim it will all be worth it in the end. Surely — surely — you're on the side of less death? But personally, I find the utilitarian perspective distasteful. We're perfectly happy to let technology (literally) throw anonymous individuals under the bus as long as less people die overall, but what if it's you that gets hit by an auto? What if it's someone you care about, not Anonymous Driver On TV? The point is that humanity is not a herd to be taken as a whole; every life has rights, including the right not to be trampled by algorithmic decisions or software bugs for the betterment of all. (Sure, you could argue just as well that we have the right not to be run over by drunk and otherwise negligent drivers, but at least this kind of death is not methodical and has some legal recourse.) I feel this perspective needs a strong voice in the tech community too, to counter the blind push forward at the expense of human lives. Now, this isn't necessarily what happened in this case, but I find Tesla's behavior in these kinds of situations to be creepy and self-serving, at best. Is every death going to come with a blog post describing how much safer automated features are compared to human drivers? Every auto-related casualty is, and should be, a massive event, not a minus-one-point on some ledger in Elon Musk's office.

bqe 10y ago
When I was in college, the I-35W bridge collapsed and many people died. In my differential equations class the next day, my professor was handing back our tests and told us–a class of engineers–that every red mark on our tests was another dead body. You might scoff and say that's hyperbole, or scaremongering, and you might be right, but I took it as a warning. It is our responsibility as ethical engineers to ensure that people aren't harmed by the technology we create. It's true that self-driving cars will likely be safer than human-driven cars, but that doesn't absolve us of responsibility. In fact, it makes it all the more poignant.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Heard something similar in a class ~"Your code could lose a company a couple of million dollars or get someone killed. If your not going to be a professional, then please chose your jobs carefully or leave the profession". I-35W was seriously bad news, plus the cell network went down.
robotresearcher 10y ago
Acceptable losses is the only possibility, if we are to have cars at all. Everyone is on the side of less death, but since there are some inherent dangers in zooming along at 120km/h, the losses can only approach zero and will never reach it. The fact that cars are used at all shows that we make something like a utilitarian decision already. They are very, very useful, with a small possibility of personal catastrophe. Same with air travel, drinking beer, or leaving the house ever, all to different degrees. If the autocars are less likely to kill me than human drivers, I'm for the autocars.
- archagon 10y ago
  > If the autocars are less likely to kill me than human drivers, I'm for the autocars. I think this situation is a bit different than the arrival of air travel or even the automobile, because with all those technologies, humans were still making, or validating, all the life-and-death decisions (barring technical failure). I also think the kind of death we're talking about matters a whole lot. What if autos were incredibly safe, but far more prone than ordinary drivers to running over small children and pets? Would society accept that? Many people are not comfortable with impenetrable algorithms managing their safety on a mass scale, or indeed, with making any conscious decisions at all when it comes to "trolley problem" issues. And that discomfort is well within their rights. Technological progress is not a divine edict, but something that society has to negotiate and agree upon. The debate should be respected.
ModernMech 10y ago
> It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars Yes, this is another thing that makes me so angry about this situation. Back in the day, I worked on a project to give autonomy to power wheelchair systems. In order to get it to market, we had to go through FDA approval, which involved testing the equipment in every conceivable scenario. We had to show how it performed in rain, snow, dust storms, sunlight, etc. and it had to be incredibly rigorous, defining all limitations, and how the user would be impacted if the systems failed. If we came the FDA and said "Our system works in many scenarios, but we've found a pathological case where on certain sunny days it will crash into certain brightly colored objects, resulting in almost certain death for the user" we would have been summarily rejected. Non starter. And yet we're willing to put a system with the above disclaimer (which should have been known to Tesla engineers. This is sensors 101.) on the market with absolutely no oversight? Seriously?
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  It occurs to me that wheelchairs have a very low fatality rate when not autonomous, but the same is not true for cars.
- rohit89 10y ago
  Doesn't Tesla have to get approval from the NHTSA for their autopilot?
- jfrisby 10y ago
  Except that the car wasn't autonomous here. The human behind the wheel had been explicitly instructed to keep hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals -- and that it was his responsibility to override the machine's judgement if circumstances warranted.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    yet all the PR material talks about autonomous driving, car drives itself wink wink
Kalium 10y ago
Every life is special. Every life is sacred. Every life has rights and hopes and dreams and its own special contribution to humanity. Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances? "Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how else should we reason about seat belts? Or anything similar that is going to help save lives in the vast majority of cases, but may fail in some? We don't always have the option of perfection. And is it really ethical to stand by as special, sacred lives end because we can't save every life, every time?
- jfrisby 10y ago
  And let's recall that this isn't a choice between "human drivers, no lives lost" vs. "AI drivers, some lives lost". It's a choice between "human drivers, MANY MANY lives lost" and "AI drivers, fewer lives lost". What would archagon have us do? Not have AI drivers until a perfect solution is possible? The "crash-unavoidable" scenario is an unavoidable reality as long as stopping distances/acceleration/reaction times are non-zero. It sounds as if archagon would have us spend all our time looking at trees -- and none of it looking at the forest -- all while thousands of people die every year under the status quo. I think perhaps the reason archagon is so aghast though is a combination of two things: 1) The illusion of [human] control and judgement. Implicit in archagon's reasoning is the idea that the outcome MIGHT have been different had a human been making a decision. Yet a human WAS in control here, and DIDN'T make a different decision. That happens. A lot. Archagon seems to be so distracted by the novelty of this situation that he/she has not noticed that. 2) The normalization of automotive deaths and safety engineering in the current industry. 90 people die per day in the U.S. due to errors made by human drivers. Every day human drivers are on the road, 90 more lives are snuffed out. If we follow archagon's hand-wringing, then how could we justify having cars AT ALL? Of course, the reality that many people would die because of the lack of cars makes even the abolition of cars a less than perfect solution with (according to archagon's apparent line of reasoning) a body count attached and all the moral implications thereof.
  - archagon 10y ago
xoa 10y ago
>It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars What. "Acceptable losses" is, and has always been the rule when it comes to accidents in all cars, ever. We've made absolutely massive safety improvements in the last few decades, cutting the death rate to around 1/3 of its historical maximum, yet even so tens of thousands of people will die in America alone this year (probably in the neighborhood of ~30k). And next year. And the year after. According to the World Health Organization, there were 1.25 million road traffic deaths in 2013, and if anything I'd expect that to have continued to rise as more and more people worldwide gain access to vehicles. Yet we will absolutely continue to support car use, because flexible mechanized point-to-point personal transportation is insanely valuable to us (and in fact American society at least simply could not function without it at all at this point). You can dress it up however you like, but the objective fact of the matter is that literally millions of deaths are considered "acceptable losses" here. Full automation represents our absolutely best shot to reduce the horrendous, annual loss of human life. So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral. You've invented imaginary "rights" that absolutely do not and should not exist. Your so called >"blind push forward at the expense of human lives" is literally the opposite of what automation aims to accomplish. And I will freely assert will accomplish, because humans are awful drivers. Really, automation is merely filling in the missing piece of personalized transport that we should have had from the start, except that our mechanical technological development was far ahead of our information gathering and processing technological development. Having a human handling that has always been a hack, and getting rid of it has such vast positives that it absolutely justifies a very strong push forward as soon as possible. Every year without driverless vehicles when we could have had them is literally hundreds of thousands more people dead. This tech does not exist in a vacuum, and context absolutely matters.
- archagon 10y ago
  > So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral. How do you counter a utilitarian argument without humanizing the situation? If my friend or loved one were killed by an ill-considered and poorly-implemented automated driving algorithm, no amount of statistics would convince me that the tradeoff was worth it. Who bears responsibility in that case? No one? I suspect that ordinary people won't accept that for a long time to come. At least with human drivers, the courts can decide culpability. At least with a human in the mix, we're all still operating within the same social and legal order.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> The point is that humanity is not a herd to be taken as a whole; That's a great point but the truth is that we already treat human lives as a resource to be spent: for instance, we allow planes to fly and automobiles to be driven even though their safety is not perfect. We allow that, out of say a million flights, one plane will fatally crash killing usually everybody on board (I don't know what the real number is- I made the 1/1mil up). So basically we accept that in order for each of us to fly to our destination, 300 ish people must die every so often. Like a kind of sacrifice. I don't see how any of this is going to stop any time soon, especially when people are always quick to tell you how safe flying is, or how, although road accidents are common and people get killed in them, "what can you do, stop driving?". It seems to me that at some level we all accept that in order for us to have our fast transport, some people must die.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  We actually don't allow planes to crash. Crashes are a result of human error or catastrophic failure. When a crash occurs, the cause is investigated so that another crash never happens for the same reason. If a defect is ever found, all affected planes are grounded until they have been fixed. I expect Autopilot to be disabled soon. Edit: >So basically we accept that in order for each of us to fly to our destination, 300 ish people must die every so often. Like a kind of sacrifice. Your position is...crazy. No plane will take off if there is a calculated chance that it could crash.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    On the contrary, every plane that takes off does so despite the known chance that it could crash.
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      No. I am talking about calculated chances, not "someone might decide to crash the plane" chances. If there is a known chance that a component of a plane might fail and cause a crash, it will not take off.
icc97 10y ago
Every event is truly massive. It's made worse by the fact that it's an entirely preventable problem. Surely the problem is that at the moment there's so many that car companies don't even count the minus-one points. It's minus 33,000 points per year in the US alone. [1] What worries me is that we're dreaming up massive fear scenarios. I see the aim of the automation is to prevent the scenarios from ever happening. Sensible speeds with sensible distances. We can never make it to having zero casualties unless we can first get to a stage where we can treat accidents as an abnormality. Something that needs to be investigated in the same manner as an aircraft crash. I too hate terms like "acceptable losses" as well as it brings up the truly horrible "cost-benefit" analysis that Ford did [2] with it being cheaper to pay out to the dead relatives rather than fix the problem. I too worry that if we accept lower standards for software now, it will set a precendent with 'acceptable' deaths that will only get lowered. If Tesla can apply the level of analysis that approaches airplane crash investigation as well as fixes to prevent each death - then I believe we're on the best path. It's also worth noting that Tesla used the word 'crash' rather than 'accident' in this report, something which has been highlighted [3] as another thing we can do to improve investigations into road deaths. [1]: http://blog.yhat.com/posts/traffic-fatalities-in-us.html http://blog.yhat.com/posts/traffic-fatalities-in-us.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analysis.2C_the_Pinto_Memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analys... [3]: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/09/why-we-say-car-accident-and-why-we-need-to-stop/403144/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/09/why-we-say-car-accide...
imh 10y ago
The whole utilitarian "well fewer people died" ignores the distinction between me driving recklessly and killing myself, and me driving recklessly and killing someone else. Blame matters. If we can decrease the negative impact on innocent bystanders, making not-at-fault fatalities decrease, I'm not sure if I can argue against it. In that case, it comes back to an old philosophical question (the trolley problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). A framing I like is as follows: "Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed." By killing one innocent, you can save many. Likewise for self-driving cars. By killing many innocents, you can save even more. If google said, "We're going to round up a bunch of people at random and murder them, but our cars will never crash," we wouldn't say "Innocent deaths have gone down and so it's acceptable." But if the same people died via malfunctions and chance, our response might change. The trolley problem isn't very palatable, but we'll need to collectively answer it.
taneq 10y ago
> We're perfectly happy to let technology (literally) throw anonymous individuals under the bus as long as less people die overall, but what if it's you that gets hit by an auto? If it's me that gets hit by a car, what do I care whether it was driven by squishy grey matter or solid silicon? It's not like AI-driven vehicles hurt more. I'm dead either way. So assuming it IS going to be me that gets hit, I'd prefer we use whichever driving mechanism is less likely to be checking Facebook or texting its friends while in control of a ton of metal moving at 100km/h.
threatofrain 10y ago
I still don't find your perspective persuasive because I don't see why I'm not any more of an individual at risk when another human hits me, and society won't hold that human liable due to absence of mens rea. Many people get hurt or killed in a situation with no criminal element. I don't see how it's any more or less personal if I'm maimed or killed by a machine versus a bounded human mind. I also don't care to blame either, because I don't see why blaming the one person who hits or kills somebody I care about is going to protect the next person who gets hit or killed. Moral blame of the stressed cognitive system seems so useless and self-indulgent. Is it less creepy if a caring mom or dad of 3 boys maims or kills me? Is it interesting to the victim that hypothetical Joe the Dad expresses remorse over the media and then business goes on for society as usual? What matters to me is that less people get hurt or killed from preventable accidents (the simple-minded utilitarian perspective that does not weigh rich vs poor, young vs old, but just wants less people dying), because I understand that the next anonymous individual getting killed by either Joe the Driver or a Google / Tesla Car could also be me or someone I care about. So I really do care about the numbers. The utilitarian perspective actually establishes a negotiable definition as its goal and it discusses the relationship between means and goals -- a position to talk about, disagree with, and measure. Discussing how over 30,000 people die a year through the lens of Driver Joe, Dad of 3 Girls, is the same as discussing economic disparity through the lens of Plumber Joe, and it's a game that media and narrative elites play better than you, and can swing in any direction they want -- they can say, here's Plumber Joe, now support my economic narrative, whatever it is, because it helps Plumber Joe (does it? who cares about creepy data-backed perspectives?). I feel that citizen decision-making improves with basic descriptive statistics over Plumber Joe, but they really prefer discussing things in terms of Plumber Joe, or in this case, Driver Jane, Mom of 3 Boys.
- archagon 10y ago
  I agree that many people would prefer living in more utilitarian society where machines have a hand in making these kinds of decisions. "Abstracting out" the damage caused by driving strictly into the domain of algorithms is surely a tempting prospect for the tech-minded, especially given that human behavior is so unpredictable and uncorrectable. But this shift into the world of semi-intelligent machines would affect all people, not just the drivers, and so it should be decided on collectively. Instead, it's at great risk of being fast-tracked onto the the rest of society by companies like Tesla — irresponsibly, at that. And this is all before even questioning the base premise — that self-driving cars will inherently be better than human drivers. Despite their many miles on the road, their combined experience pales compared to human-driven miles, especially in edge cases and harsh weather conditions. There are huge risks in introducing this technology prematurely.

bqe 10y ago

When I was in college, the I-35W bridge collapsed and many people died. In my differential equations class the next day, my professor was handing back our tests and told us–a class of engineers–that every red mark on our tests was another dead body. You might scoff and say that's hyperbole, or scaremongering, and you might be right, but I took it as a warning. It is our responsibility as ethical engineers to ensure that people aren't harmed by the technology we create. It's true that self-driving cars will likely be safer than human-driven cars, but that doesn't absolve us of responsibility. In fact, it makes it all the more poignant.

protomyth 10y ago
Heard something similar in a class ~"Your code could lose a company a couple of million dollars or get someone killed. If your not going to be a professional, then please chose your jobs carefully or leave the profession". I-35W was seriously bad news, plus the cell network went down.

robotresearcher 10y ago

Acceptable losses is the only possibility, if we are to have cars at all. Everyone is on the side of less death, but since there are some inherent dangers in zooming along at 120km/h, the losses can only approach zero and will never reach it. The fact that cars are used at all shows that we make something like a utilitarian decision already. They are very, very useful, with a small possibility of personal catastrophe. Same with air travel, drinking beer, or leaving the house ever, all to different degrees. If the autocars are less likely to kill me than human drivers, I'm for the autocars.

archagon 10y ago
> If the autocars are less likely to kill me than human drivers, I'm for the autocars. I think this situation is a bit different than the arrival of air travel or even the automobile, because with all those technologies, humans were still making, or validating, all the life-and-death decisions (barring technical failure). I also think the kind of death we're talking about matters a whole lot. What if autos were incredibly safe, but far more prone than ordinary drivers to running over small children and pets? Would society accept that? Many people are not comfortable with impenetrable algorithms managing their safety on a mass scale, or indeed, with making any conscious decisions at all when it comes to "trolley problem" issues. And that discomfort is well within their rights. Technological progress is not a divine edict, but something that society has to negotiate and agree upon. The debate should be respected.

ModernMech 10y ago

> It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars Yes, this is another thing that makes me so angry about this situation. Back in the day, I worked on a project to give autonomy to power wheelchair systems. In order to get it to market, we had to go through FDA approval, which involved testing the equipment in every conceivable scenario. We had to show how it performed in rain, snow, dust storms, sunlight, etc. and it had to be incredibly rigorous, defining all limitations, and how the user would be impacted if the systems failed. If we came the FDA and said "Our system works in many scenarios, but we've found a pathological case where on certain sunny days it will crash into certain brightly colored objects, resulting in almost certain death for the user" we would have been summarily rejected. Non starter. And yet we're willing to put a system with the above disclaimer (which should have been known to Tesla engineers. This is sensors 101.) on the market with absolutely no oversight? Seriously?

thaumasiotes 10y ago
It occurs to me that wheelchairs have a very low fatality rate when not autonomous, but the same is not true for cars.
rohit89 10y ago
Doesn't Tesla have to get approval from the NHTSA for their autopilot?
jfrisby 10y ago
Except that the car wasn't autonomous here. The human behind the wheel had been explicitly instructed to keep hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals -- and that it was his responsibility to override the machine's judgement if circumstances warranted.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  yet all the PR material talks about autonomous driving, car drives itself wink wink

Kalium 10y ago

Every life is special. Every life is sacred. Every life has rights and hopes and dreams and its own special contribution to humanity. Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances? "Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how else should we reason about seat belts? Or anything similar that is going to help save lives in the vast majority of cases, but may fail in some? We don't always have the option of perfection. And is it really ethical to stand by as special, sacred lives end because we can't save every life, every time?

jfrisby 10y ago
And let's recall that this isn't a choice between "human drivers, no lives lost" vs. "AI drivers, some lives lost". It's a choice between "human drivers, MANY MANY lives lost" and "AI drivers, fewer lives lost". What would archagon have us do? Not have AI drivers until a perfect solution is possible? The "crash-unavoidable" scenario is an unavoidable reality as long as stopping distances/acceleration/reaction times are non-zero. It sounds as if archagon would have us spend all our time looking at trees -- and none of it looking at the forest -- all while thousands of people die every year under the status quo. I think perhaps the reason archagon is so aghast though is a combination of two things: 1) The illusion of [human] control and judgement. Implicit in archagon's reasoning is the idea that the outcome MIGHT have been different had a human been making a decision. Yet a human WAS in control here, and DIDN'T make a different decision. That happens. A lot. Archagon seems to be so distracted by the novelty of this situation that he/she has not noticed that. 2) The normalization of automotive deaths and safety engineering in the current industry. 90 people die per day in the U.S. due to errors made by human drivers. Every day human drivers are on the road, 90 more lives are snuffed out. If we follow archagon's hand-wringing, then how could we justify having cars AT ALL? Of course, the reality that many people would die because of the lack of cars makes even the abolition of cars a less than perfect solution with (according to archagon's apparent line of reasoning) a body count attached and all the moral implications thereof.
- archagon 10y ago

xoa 10y ago

>It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars What. "Acceptable losses" is, and has always been the rule when it comes to accidents in all cars, ever. We've made absolutely massive safety improvements in the last few decades, cutting the death rate to around 1/3 of its historical maximum, yet even so tens of thousands of people will die in America alone this year (probably in the neighborhood of ~30k). And next year. And the year after. According to the World Health Organization, there were 1.25 million road traffic deaths in 2013, and if anything I'd expect that to have continued to rise as more and more people worldwide gain access to vehicles. Yet we will absolutely continue to support car use, because flexible mechanized point-to-point personal transportation is insanely valuable to us (and in fact American society at least simply could not function without it at all at this point). You can dress it up however you like, but the objective fact of the matter is that literally millions of deaths are considered "acceptable losses" here. Full automation represents our absolutely best shot to reduce the horrendous, annual loss of human life. So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral. You've invented imaginary "rights" that absolutely do not and should not exist. Your so called >"blind push forward at the expense of human lives" is literally the opposite of what automation aims to accomplish. And I will freely assert will accomplish, because humans are awful drivers. Really, automation is merely filling in the missing piece of personalized transport that we should have had from the start, except that our mechanical technological development was far ahead of our information gathering and processing technological development. Having a human handling that has always been a hack, and getting rid of it has such vast positives that it absolutely justifies a very strong push forward as soon as possible. Every year without driverless vehicles when we could have had them is literally hundreds of thousands more people dead. This tech does not exist in a vacuum, and context absolutely matters.

archagon 10y ago
> So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral. How do you counter a utilitarian argument without humanizing the situation? If my friend or loved one were killed by an ill-considered and poorly-implemented automated driving algorithm, no amount of statistics would convince me that the tradeoff was worth it. Who bears responsibility in that case? No one? I suspect that ordinary people won't accept that for a long time to come. At least with human drivers, the courts can decide culpability. At least with a human in the mix, we're all still operating within the same social and legal order.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> The point is that humanity is not a herd to be taken as a whole; That's a great point but the truth is that we already treat human lives as a resource to be spent: for instance, we allow planes to fly and automobiles to be driven even though their safety is not perfect. We allow that, out of say a million flights, one plane will fatally crash killing usually everybody on board (I don't know what the real number is- I made the 1/1mil up). So basically we accept that in order for each of us to fly to our destination, 300 ish people must die every so often. Like a kind of sacrifice. I don't see how any of this is going to stop any time soon, especially when people are always quick to tell you how safe flying is, or how, although road accidents are common and people get killed in them, "what can you do, stop driving?". It seems to me that at some level we all accept that in order for us to have our fast transport, some people must die.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
We actually don't allow planes to crash. Crashes are a result of human error or catastrophic failure. When a crash occurs, the cause is investigated so that another crash never happens for the same reason. If a defect is ever found, all affected planes are grounded until they have been fixed. I expect Autopilot to be disabled soon. Edit: >So basically we accept that in order for each of us to fly to our destination, 300 ish people must die every so often. Like a kind of sacrifice. Your position is...crazy. No plane will take off if there is a calculated chance that it could crash.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  On the contrary, every plane that takes off does so despite the known chance that it could crash.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    No. I am talking about calculated chances, not "someone might decide to crash the plane" chances. If there is a known chance that a component of a plane might fail and cause a crash, it will not take off.

icc97 10y ago

Every event is truly massive. It's made worse by the fact that it's an entirely preventable problem. Surely the problem is that at the moment there's so many that car companies don't even count the minus-one points. It's minus 33,000 points per year in the US alone. [1] What worries me is that we're dreaming up massive fear scenarios. I see the aim of the automation is to prevent the scenarios from ever happening. Sensible speeds with sensible distances. We can never make it to having zero casualties unless we can first get to a stage where we can treat accidents as an abnormality. Something that needs to be investigated in the same manner as an aircraft crash. I too hate terms like "acceptable losses" as well as it brings up the truly horrible "cost-benefit" analysis that Ford did [2] with it being cheaper to pay out to the dead relatives rather than fix the problem. I too worry that if we accept lower standards for software now, it will set a precendent with 'acceptable' deaths that will only get lowered. If Tesla can apply the level of analysis that approaches airplane crash investigation as well as fixes to prevent each death - then I believe we're on the best path. It's also worth noting that Tesla used the word 'crash' rather than 'accident' in this report, something which has been highlighted [3] as another thing we can do to improve investigations into road deaths. [1]: http://blog.yhat.com/posts/traffic-fatalities-in-us.html http://blog.yhat.com/posts/traffic-fatalities-in-us.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analysis.2C_the_Pinto_Memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analys... [3]: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/09/why-we-say-car-accident-and-why-we-need-to-stop/403144/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/09/why-we-say-car-accide...

imh 10y ago

The whole utilitarian "well fewer people died" ignores the distinction between me driving recklessly and killing myself, and me driving recklessly and killing someone else. Blame matters. If we can decrease the negative impact on innocent bystanders, making not-at-fault fatalities decrease, I'm not sure if I can argue against it. In that case, it comes back to an old philosophical question (the trolley problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). A framing I like is as follows: "Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed." By killing one innocent, you can save many. Likewise for self-driving cars. By killing many innocents, you can save even more. If google said, "We're going to round up a bunch of people at random and murder them, but our cars will never crash," we wouldn't say "Innocent deaths have gone down and so it's acceptable." But if the same people died via malfunctions and chance, our response might change. The trolley problem isn't very palatable, but we'll need to collectively answer it.

taneq 10y ago

> We're perfectly happy to let technology (literally) throw anonymous individuals under the bus as long as less people die overall, but what if it's you that gets hit by an auto? If it's me that gets hit by a car, what do I care whether it was driven by squishy grey matter or solid silicon? It's not like AI-driven vehicles hurt more. I'm dead either way. So assuming it IS going to be me that gets hit, I'd prefer we use whichever driving mechanism is less likely to be checking Facebook or texting its friends while in control of a ton of metal moving at 100km/h.

threatofrain 10y ago

I still don't find your perspective persuasive because I don't see why I'm not any more of an individual at risk when another human hits me, and society won't hold that human liable due to absence of mens rea. Many people get hurt or killed in a situation with no criminal element. I don't see how it's any more or less personal if I'm maimed or killed by a machine versus a bounded human mind. I also don't care to blame either, because I don't see why blaming the one person who hits or kills somebody I care about is going to protect the next person who gets hit or killed. Moral blame of the stressed cognitive system seems so useless and self-indulgent. Is it less creepy if a caring mom or dad of 3 boys maims or kills me? Is it interesting to the victim that hypothetical Joe the Dad expresses remorse over the media and then business goes on for society as usual? What matters to me is that less people get hurt or killed from preventable accidents (the simple-minded utilitarian perspective that does not weigh rich vs poor, young vs old, but just wants less people dying), because I understand that the next anonymous individual getting killed by either Joe the Driver or a Google / Tesla Car could also be me or someone I care about. So I really do care about the numbers. The utilitarian perspective actually establishes a negotiable definition as its goal and it discusses the relationship between means and goals -- a position to talk about, disagree with, and measure. Discussing how over 30,000 people die a year through the lens of Driver Joe, Dad of 3 Girls, is the same as discussing economic disparity through the lens of Plumber Joe, and it's a game that media and narrative elites play better than you, and can swing in any direction they want -- they can say, here's Plumber Joe, now support my economic narrative, whatever it is, because it helps Plumber Joe (does it? who cares about creepy data-backed perspectives?). I feel that citizen decision-making improves with basic descriptive statistics over Plumber Joe, but they really prefer discussing things in terms of Plumber Joe, or in this case, Driver Jane, Mom of 3 Boys.

archagon 10y ago
I agree that many people would prefer living in more utilitarian society where machines have a hand in making these kinds of decisions. "Abstracting out" the damage caused by driving strictly into the domain of algorithms is surely a tempting prospect for the tech-minded, especially given that human behavior is so unpredictable and uncorrectable. But this shift into the world of semi-intelligent machines would affect all people, not just the drivers, and so it should be decided on collectively. Instead, it's at great risk of being fast-tracked onto the the rest of society by companies like Tesla — irresponsibly, at that. And this is all before even questioning the base premise — that self-driving cars will inherently be better than human drivers. Despite their many miles on the road, their combined experience pales compared to human-driven miles, especially in edge cases and harsh weather conditions. There are huge risks in introducing this technology prematurely.