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The responses in this thread all seem to hold the assumption that these flotillas of self driving cars will have a low failure rate. The Tesla crash makes it e

The responses in this thread all seem to hold the assumption that these flotillas of self driving cars will have a low failure rate. The Tesla crash makes it easy to imagine a 100 car freeway pile-ups caused by AI drivers discovering novel ways to crash. Driving headlong into the side of a trailer because the color looked like the sky? The possibilities are endless, and the subsequent media attention and reactionary legislation could set back the whole project back a generation.

greglindahl 10y ago
Are you saying there hasn't already been a 100-car freeway pileup caused by (now-standard) cruise control? Or that human-driven cars don't drive into the side of a trailer because the driver didn't see it?
- cmotzakut6 10y ago
  >Or that human-driven cars don't drive into the side of a trailer because the driver didn't see it? I won't claim that that never happens, but I doubt it's very common. If you were to take 1000 random car crash deaths I do not think a very large proportion of them are caused by people running head-on into a sideways tractor trailer that they had a long distance to notice and react to. Tesla says this is the only fatality in 130 million miles of Autopilot driving, and that in the US there is a fatality every 94 million miles of driving overall. But it's known that fatalities are more common in risky driving scenarios where Autopilot is not used, so this is not an apples-to-apples comparison (https://www.progressive.com/newsroom/article/2002/may/fivemiles/ https://www.progressive.com/newsroom/article/2002/may/fivemi..., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449863/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449863/). If the appropriate adjustment is 40% or more, then the Tesla is riskier than human driving in the "non-risky" scenarios. The fact that the accident here was an uncommon failure mode for humans, and the Tesla was at fault, should give a hint as to which direction the numbers need to be adjusted.
  - deleted 10y ago
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greglindahl 10y ago

Are you saying there hasn't already been a 100-car freeway pileup caused by (now-standard) cruise control? Or that human-driven cars don't drive into the side of a trailer because the driver didn't see it?

cmotzakut6 10y ago
>Or that human-driven cars don't drive into the side of a trailer because the driver didn't see it? I won't claim that that never happens, but I doubt it's very common. If you were to take 1000 random car crash deaths I do not think a very large proportion of them are caused by people running head-on into a sideways tractor trailer that they had a long distance to notice and react to. Tesla says this is the only fatality in 130 million miles of Autopilot driving, and that in the US there is a fatality every 94 million miles of driving overall. But it's known that fatalities are more common in risky driving scenarios where Autopilot is not used, so this is not an apples-to-apples comparison (https://www.progressive.com/newsroom/article/2002/may/fivemiles/ https://www.progressive.com/newsroom/article/2002/may/fivemi..., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449863/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449863/). If the appropriate adjustment is 40% or more, then the Tesla is riskier than human driving in the "non-risky" scenarios. The fact that the accident here was an uncommon failure mode for humans, and the Tesla was at fault, should give a hint as to which direction the numbers need to be adjusted.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]