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Oddly, this sounds about right considering the weight you would have to bear forever if you ever hear of some fatal incident involving some technology you built

Oddly, this sounds about right considering the weight you would have to bear forever if you ever hear of some fatal incident involving some technology you built.

whack 10y ago
Should you feel guilty about building technology that saves 10 lives for every 1 person that it kills? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-driving-cars-could-save-300000-lives-per-decade-in-america/407956/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-d...
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  No question that thought is comforting, but that is the example of the benefit which never appears before your eyes (i.e. it is not tangible, unlike the converse). I am not saying people should stop working on autonomous cars, it was just a comment on how fraught with moral weight the occupation is, particularly for the pioneers.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    But commercial aviation is extremely safe. I think the point is where it will be, not where it is. This being said, having to balance business issues and safety of a system with as long a lever-arm as this seems blindingly difficult. I wonder hos much of the real work here is ultimately more like insurance than engineering ( as if there were any real difference to start with ).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- archagon 10y ago
  Not everyone has a strictly utilitarian viewpoint. One life lost might be a thousand times more horrifying than one life saved.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  People have different points of view. There are no doubt people working on applying the same technology to hunter/killer robots and missiles, etc.
nibs 10y ago
Under this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year. I sincerely doubt the satisfaction from all the disability adjusted life years saved from facilitating the creation of autonomous cars would be overshadowed by the occasion life lost. It is a similar level of power as a commanding officer in a conflict situation.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Under this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year Sounds good to me.
  - ldonley 10y ago
    Where do I sign up?
    - jacalata 10y ago
      The Air Force
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  There is a span of time for which drivers/owners of autonomous vehicles are, in effect, test pilots.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Just trying to construct the cost model for that is pretty deep. The high-altitude view is that there will be a process that slowly eliminates safety hazards. An analogous process is lineman safety in the electric grid; at one point the probability of fatal accident for electric linemen was quite high, and it declined to next to nothing as safety procedures improved. I don't think it'll really be safe until autonomous cars have transponders and can negotiate space in real time, but then you still have all the legacy vehicles out there that don't have transponders.
- asperous 10y ago
  One of the professors at my uni, Dr Yavuz (~yavuza), is researching the crypto to make real time transponders secure
jwatte 10y ago
I think you overdramatize. If lives saved is greater than lives lost, your doing great! It's not like all military contractor engineers live under a constant cloud of self hatred and suicidal thoughts, either, and they build things that are about trading "many" "enemy" casualties for "few" "friendly" ones. By contrast, self driving is doing almost entirely good along any moral spectrum.
wott 10y ago
The how much do you wish to pay the hundreds of thousands of people working for example, in aeronautics or railway, just to stay in the domain of transports? 200 times more?
CN7R 10y ago
In the United States, human error accounts for 95% of car accidents, with 33000 fatalities and 2.35m injured each year. Behind the house, the second most expensive purchase in a typical person's life is their car, and yet in a car's lifetime, only 2.56% is spent driving on roads with the remainder spent parked or in traffic.

Oddly, this sounds about right considering the weight you would have to bear forever if you ever hear of some fatal incident involving some technology you built.

whack 10y ago

Should you feel guilty about building technology that saves 10 lives for every 1 person that it kills? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-driving-cars-could-save-300000-lives-per-decade-in-america/407956/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-d...

thr0waway1239 10y ago
No question that thought is comforting, but that is the example of the benefit which never appears before your eyes (i.e. it is not tangible, unlike the converse). I am not saying people should stop working on autonomous cars, it was just a comment on how fraught with moral weight the occupation is, particularly for the pioneers.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  But commercial aviation is extremely safe. I think the point is where it will be, not where it is. This being said, having to balance business issues and safety of a system with as long a lever-arm as this seems blindingly difficult. I wonder hos much of the real work here is ultimately more like insurance than engineering ( as if there were any real difference to start with ).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
archagon 10y ago
Not everyone has a strictly utilitarian viewpoint. One life lost might be a thousand times more horrifying than one life saved.
Spooky23 10y ago
People have different points of view. There are no doubt people working on applying the same technology to hunter/killer robots and missiles, etc.

nibs 10y ago

Under this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year. I sincerely doubt the satisfaction from all the disability adjusted life years saved from facilitating the creation of autonomous cars would be overshadowed by the occasion life lost. It is a similar level of power as a commanding officer in a conflict situation.

rhizome 10y ago
Under this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year Sounds good to me.
- ldonley 10y ago
  Where do I sign up?
  - jacalata 10y ago
    The Air Force
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
There is a span of time for which drivers/owners of autonomous vehicles are, in effect, test pilots.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

Just trying to construct the cost model for that is pretty deep. The high-altitude view is that there will be a process that slowly eliminates safety hazards. An analogous process is lineman safety in the electric grid; at one point the probability of fatal accident for electric linemen was quite high, and it declined to next to nothing as safety procedures improved. I don't think it'll really be safe until autonomous cars have transponders and can negotiate space in real time, but then you still have all the legacy vehicles out there that don't have transponders.

asperous 10y ago
One of the professors at my uni, Dr Yavuz (~yavuza), is researching the crypto to make real time transponders secure

jwatte 10y ago

I think you overdramatize. If lives saved is greater than lives lost, your doing great! It's not like all military contractor engineers live under a constant cloud of self hatred and suicidal thoughts, either, and they build things that are about trading "many" "enemy" casualties for "few" "friendly" ones. By contrast, self driving is doing almost entirely good along any moral spectrum.

wott 10y ago

The how much do you wish to pay the hundreds of thousands of people working for example, in aeronautics or railway, just to stay in the domain of transports? 200 times more?

CN7R 10y ago

In the United States, human error accounts for 95% of car accidents, with 33000 fatalities and 2.35m injured each year. Behind the house, the second most expensive purchase in a typical person's life is their car, and yet in a car's lifetime, only 2.56% is spent driving on roads with the remainder spent parked or in traffic.