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>> Regulators test new products until they feel certain that people will not be put at risk. Inventions from elevators to aspirin were subject to fierce scrutin
by cornellwright 10y ago
>> Regulators test new products until they feel certain that people will not be put at risk. Inventions from elevators to aspirin were subject to fierce scrutiny before they were broadly adopted. We can’t apply the same level of scrutiny to driverless cars.
This article is clearly written by someone who has never worked on a safety critical system. There is a method for establishing risk and making risk-benefit tradeoffs, not just feeling certain. If we did that many more people would be killed.
If the author is arguing about public scrutiny, then I generally agree with the argument, but existing safety engineering practices will work for driverless cars.
Source: I work on hardware and software for surgical devices (among other things).
- terravion 10y agoI think he's arguing for virtual rather than real world testing to verify extremely low probability behavior. At $0.55 a mile, it can be hard to test out to five standard deviations, but if the question is, does the software correctly handle these events, it is really just a test script.
- cornellwright 10y agoThat's fine and that is already an acceptable method so long as you can make the case for why it's representative and do some real world testing to validate it.
- AstralStorm 10y ago5 standard deviations? Who cares about handling lots of easy situations. Just create a big old test suite, procedurally generated. It would make for a nice game and driver training tool too. Verify against average and expert drivers to set grading. Additionally get statistics about prevalence of bad driving, which will allow you to check if the driverless system is safe enough using plain old cost-benefit. Moreover, include assisted driving systems (emergency takeover) in the evaluation. No need to require perfection, failing gracefully is also acceptable. For example, in a weird situation, the car could slow down and engage notifications at drivers.
- bargl 10y agoI worked for the FAA on these sorts of Risk Analysis Panels when I was younger. It's basically a trade-off of the likely damage or impact (a rating something like stubbed toe to everyone on the plane dies) vs the chance it will happen (once a day, year, 100 years, shouldn't ever happen but can maybe possibly). An example of this is babies in laps on airplane. What is the benefit? People with kids will fly rather than drive. But are kids safe on a parents lap? No not really? Are they SAFER on a parents lap in an airplane than in a cross country trip in a car-seat? It turns out they are. So you have babies in laps on airplanes. It's an analysis of safety not a mitigation of situations where people might, with extremely low probability, die.
- andreareina 10y agoI think we can charitably take it to have an implicit "by the appropriate standard for evaluating risk". That is to say, "Regulators ... feel certain people will not be put at risk" -> "According to the industry standard(s) for evaluating risk, the new product is no more dangerous than the prevailing situation".