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> The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morall

• tikl1 10y ago
  Humans are the very definition of imperfection and thinking that you are capable of "correctly using a car" that is, never make the mistake that will cause a terrible accident is a big problem. It's probably why so much people keep resisting evolution like autopilot, they can't admit that even them can someday fail and crash. They believe that if they are good drivers they will avoid it. Sadly very good drivers die every day and not only because of someone else's mistake. Of course a computer or a machine can fail too, but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do. Because we can be careless, sleepy, drunk, unskilled,... Now the real problem we will face (what scares me even though I'm pro-autopilot) is to accept to hand our lives to machines that will have to make choices in emergency situations (should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it ?, who is responsible in case of a crash ?,...)
  • greendestiny 10y ago
    "but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do" Ok I know this is my little cause of the moment, but seriously why are computers apriori better at anything? Sure they don't make poor life choices but they are absolutely at the mercy of the quality of the algorithms, sensors, operating system, training data and physical computational hardware.
    • doppel 10y ago
      Better is probably a poor word, but consistent at least. Even good drivers may run the speed limit and be "perfectly safe", but the autopilot will always stay at the speed limit and will always make the same choices in a given situation - there's no emotion or influence (alcohol, drugs, bad mood, etc.). In short, they are boring but safe.
      • greendestiny 10y ago
        "boring but safe." But seriously, the most important part of that sentence 'safe' is absolutely unproven.
        • chriswarbo 10y ago
          I agree. It's like arguing that autonomous weapons systems are better than human-operated because they don't get tired, whilst neglecting to mention that, say, their object detection algorithms can't tell the difference between combatants and civilians. Autonomous systems, as a technology, are capable of performing better than humans; that doesn't imply that some particular autonomous system (e.g. Tesla's Autopilot) does so right now.
    • ishi 10y ago
      Computers are not apriori better - you can always develop a stupid or buggy algorithm that fails often. But Tesla is working to PROVE (using real-world data) that autopilot is better than a human driver, and IMPROVE it constantly until it is ten times better.
      • 10y ago
  • kybernetikos 10y ago
    > but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do. Maybe eventually, but what I'm interested in is right now, does the tesla autopilot fail more often than a human driving in similar conditions. My suspicion is that it does.
    • tikl1 10y ago
      I don't know for Tesla but I think google autonomous cars are already there, so Tesla must not be far.
    • jobead 10y ago
      The data already gathered would indicate that your suspicion is wrong. Currently the US averages 1 fatality for every 89 million miles driven. Autopilot is at almost twice that with only 1 fatality. So autopilot already fails less often than a human. Consider this anecdote: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132 Then rethink if you really believe that this pedestrian deserves to be dead because you don't trust the data and the world-class engineers for which this is literally their job everyday.
      • kybernetikos 10y ago
        Either you've not read my comments in this thread or I've not clearly explained my point. Your statistic ignores the fact that autopilot is only used in relatively simple situations, and since you're measuring fatalities only, you need to compare it only with cars of equivalent safety ratings. If you have statistics comparing humans and autopilot in relevant situations I'd be very interested, but the ones you quote are exactly the ones I'm complaining about as being nonrepresentative. Even considering all miles equally, a rate of 1 per 130 million autopilot miles (a much too small statistic from which to generalise) still does not compare particularly well to a lot of cars driven by humans, e.g. the BMW 7 series. Incidentally, it's not at all clear that the situation described in your anecdote even involved the autopilot functionality, as it sounds like it was autonomous breaking which is a standard feature on many cars.
      • ProblemFactory 10y ago
  • Shivetya 10y ago
    the autopilot system, if not every system similar that is offered these days, does the driving in conditions that are already likely the easiest a driver will encounter. the real shocking truth is none of these systems is capable of driving when even skilled drivers might need the assistance. think about it this way, car safety systems are designed to insure recovery of safe driving during some of the worst conditions yet self driving systems cannot handle most of these poor conditions as they cannot accurately see and assess the situation.
    • tikl1 10y ago
      I'm not sure about this... Do you have sources on that ? I'm pretty sure that on contrary, autonomous car constructors are actually testing their cars in the worst possible conditions even some that are unlikely to ever happen to anyone. At least it's what Google is telling about their test process.
  • spurgu 10y ago
    > should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it ? It would seem as the life expectancy of dwarves will go up.
  • restalis 10y ago
    "Sadly very good drivers die every day and not only because of someone else's mistake." Indeed, and that may often be because of taking warranted risks. It bothers me that when making comparisons of driving safety people tend to suffer from absence blindness and discount other important things like the death avoidance cases. Let's say you have a bleeding injured person which requires urgent access to a medical facility. Here the driver can take some risks in order to save a life. Or any number of causes that may warrant risk taking. Now, take away the control from that driver and leave it to an autopilot that may compute the driving parameters in order to satisfy minimum pollution, safety (from the manufacturer's judicial liabilities prospective), and whatnot. Heck, I foresee cases when the autopilot won't even approve any movement due to whatever considerations when there may be passengers in risk of loosing their lives if won't reach somewhere soon enough. For now people can take risks, which may be both good and bad. Don't look only at the bad side.
    • tikl1 10y ago
      Well you can say it would be infuriating to be unable to take risks to save let's say your wife dying in the car but you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?
      • ElComradio 10y ago
        The social contract is such that people can reasonably be assumed to be ok with a minuscule increase in risk in order to get a dying person to the hospital.
      • restalis 10y ago
        "you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?" That's exactly what I argue about. In a rare (but very important) occasion where risk taking would be needed, you're forcing the moral dilemma of an even rarer occurrence with a presumed victim. We don't know if it would come to that. For all I care there might be only some speeding on a rainy road. My car will recommend going slowly for my own sake, but in that moment I care less for me personally and more for avoiding wife's impending death. Actually, I fear that my car will not limit itself to recommending, it will force that on me, because it knows better, because the people behind the said decisions won't be only the engineers trying give their best, but also lawyers doing "mercantile calculation of legal liability", politicians trying to score on public safety through their regulations, and so on!
  • bryanlarsen 10y ago
    > should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it? If a driver ever has to make that choice, they were going too fast in the first place. You should never be going faster than the stopping distance to the nearest blind spot, unless you're driving on a controlled access highway.
    • tikl1 10y ago
      Yep that's the theory and sadly we all drive too fast at one point.
  • rasz_pl 10y ago
    > should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it? I seem to remember reading a paper postulating drivers unconsciously always try to avoid crashing their side of the car into hard objects.
  • rsync 10y ago
    "Humans are the very definition of imperfection and thinking that you are capable of "correctly using a car" that is, never make the mistake that will cause a terrible accident is a big problem." A human, with proper training and heuristics, can reasonably be expected to never make a mistake that causes a terrible accident. Unfortunately, a large part of "proper training" involves being driven around as a passenger for your entire childhood, immersed in a car culture. Further, the heuristics are commonly ignored by males younger than, say, 25.
    • mrexroad 10y ago
      > A human, with proper training and heuristics, can reasonably be expected to never make a mistake that causes a terrible accident. fighter pilots make mistakes causing terrible accidents. and they're a group of humans that were pre-screened to ensure physical/mental/emotional fit, and had extensive training.
    • tikl1 10y ago
      Wow! That's exactly what I said earlier, you are convinced that a good driver (one with proper training or whatever heuristics are) will be able to avoid those crashes. And in my opinion the only reason that can make you believe that is that there is, fortunately, few enough car crashes that you think those who had never crashed avoided it because of their skills. Of course skills and training will allow you to behave well in a lots of situations that could have killed you otherwise but my conviction is that if you go through life without a big accident, a huge part of it is due to luck. Luck that you didn't encounter the situation in which training and skills couldn't have saved you.
  • visarga 10y ago
    Maybe it shouldn't choose, instead, it should pick at random, based on the probabilities of survival. If both have the same probability, then both should get the same chance to survive. Otherwise there will be endless bickering about how to decide every case.
• samolang 10y ago
  https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132
  • makomk 10y ago
    That's what the rest of the industry refer to as autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian detection. It's a few years old now, there's been some vague talk of eventually making it mandatory, and you don't have to automate normal driving in any way to get the safety benefits from it. (In fact, I suspect it's probably better if it's not part of Autopilot, since then there's going to less risk of the driver not paying attention in the first place.)
    • csours 10y ago
      To achieve IIHS Top Safety Pick+[1] you have to have front crash prevention, so it's "mandatory" already if you want your car to be perceived as safe. 1. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/front-crash-prevention-tests http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/front-crash-pr... 2. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings Disclaimer - I work for GM, any opinions are my own.
• realo 10y ago
  You have to think forward to understand Musk. Which would you prefer? Going at 100 km/h with autopilot on today's highways, sharing the road with people without autopilot, or going at 250 km/h with autopilot on a highway where everyone else is also on autopilot? We will have to follow a likely tortuous path to get from now to then, but I am totally convinced we will get there.
  • lorenzhs 10y ago
    The problem with that is that aerodynamic drag grows with the third power of speed, so going faster requires much more energy, even after accounting for slipstream benefits that a self-driving mechanism could exploit. For some numbers, see https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-you-drive-a-Tesla-S-P90D-at-maximum-speed-on-a-single-full-charge https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-you-drive-a-Tesla-S-P90D-... . The top comment is about racing, but the one below it lists 300Wh/km at 160km/h and 380Wh/km at 180km/h. That's a quarter more energy per km (!) for going 20km/h faster.
    • jobead 10y ago
      If the energy is free b/c it comes from the solar panels on the roof of my garage, why do I care?
      • lorenzhs 10y ago
        Because it severely limits your range.
        • jobead 10y ago
          I live 8 miles from work. "Limiting my range" from 200 miles to 150 miles between daily charge ups is irrelevant.
          • sn0v 10y ago
            Not to mention that battery tech will hopefully improve once everybody relies on battery powered cars, and some currently infeasible tech becomes cost-effective due to large scale deployments.
• squeaky-clean 10y ago
  > A car used correctly is safe. A car is safe when it's used correctly, and all the other cars on the road are used correctly, and all the people and animals near the road behave correctly, and the weather behaves correctly.
  • kybernetikos 10y ago
    Lots of people seem to have picked up on this. It was in fact the whole point I was making that it's generally not possible in the real world for a human to consistently use a car correctly. That's why I don't care about statistics for autopilot 'when used correctly'. I'm interested in autopilot as it gets used in the real world.