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Proof that so-called autopilot systems are a danger to the public would be evidence that they perform worse than the average driver. I haven't seen such evidenc

Proof that so-called autopilot systems are a danger to the public would be evidence that they perform worse than the average driver. I haven't seen such evidence, what are you referencing?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
It's the other way around - you need a proof that they perform comparable to an average driver during expected use, and they do not have absurdly stupid corner cases during actually expected use.
- lutorm 10y ago
  Well, humans have absurdly stupid corner cases during actual use, too. It depends on how small the corner is, I think.
  - thfuran 10y ago
    Yes and humans require certification before they are permitted to drive vehicles on public roadways.
    - strathmeyer 10y ago
      To get that certification, do they test you first, or do they wait for you to screw up and then take it away from you??
      - azinman2 10y ago
        We know, being humans, and that we have the ability to process lots of complex information in a way that's very difficult for computers to replicate. Hard AI doesn't actually exist (yet). We also have a 100 years of humans driving cars worldwide so we understand well what they're good at and what they're not, so laws & safety designs take all of this into consideration. Each computer system will be encountering new, diverse things in the real world without a good understanding of how they'll perform. There are lots of crazy hard problems here that no one has solved yet. So to suggest we just automatically trust it because humans make mistakes is foolish when the consequences are so high. If someone came out with a surgery "autopilot" tomorrow, would you suggest it start giving triple bypass surgeries right away without FDA approval because humans make errors too?
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        One of the features of the common human firmware is self-preservation instinct. It lets us trust that our fellow drivers, while still prone to mistakes, won't generally make obviously suicidal errors. Can one say the same about a new ML algorithm running on some board designed half a decade ago? How exactly would one know, without a thorough audit?
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        They test you first, but if despite passing the test you screw up sufficiently badly later they decertify you. It's a belt-and-suspenders system.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    We've been dealing with those corner cases for thousands of years and we know them pretty well. Given that we all run on pretty much the same hardware and firmware (with minor differences), you could say humans have been thoroughly tested for few millennia, including a hundred or so years of road testing. So yeah, I a bit of thorough testing of a completely new hardware running completely new software isn't too much to ask for.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
digler999 10y ago
so we should wait till a statistically-significant percentage of people die before we tell everyone, "yep, definitely dangerous. Lets add some regulation" ? I wonder if they could shut him down on the basis of car insurance requirements and the legal definition of "driver". If "driver" is defined as the "person" inputting control commands, then either you dont consider the computer a person, and then nobody is legally "driving" the car, or else the software somehow meets the definition of a "person" or driver, in which case its an unlicensed driver operating the vehicle and insurance may not have to cover it.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  The NHTSA has been a strong proponent of self-driving technology and has gone out of its way to make sure there is a path to doing it legally, without pulling the legal 'gotcha' that you described here. The device would probably be SAE Level 2, and should be regulated as such.
saosebastiao 10y ago
When you measure the safety of autonomous cars by counting the miles they travel, and not counting the miles that they intentionally avoid or defer to a human, you have succeeded in creating a metric that looks like it's useful for comparison, but is actually completely meaningless. It's like measuring typing speed while ignoring typos. Until autonomous vehicles are subject to the full spectrum of conditions that human drivers face, incidents/mile is not a meaningful measure of comparative safety. And until then, the burden of proof should be on the creators.
- stale2002 10y ago
  Not true. Lots of accidents happen in "good" conditions because humans suck at driving. The way you compare, is you give a self driving car to a person, and compare actually usage for that person, and see if owning a self driving car increases or reduces accidents for that person. Being perfect only half the time is still revolutionary.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    I have a 100% perfect safety record over probably hundreds of thousands of miles of driving a class B truck with my knees instead of my hands, using cruise control, on straight empty highways in Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, with perfect weather and good road conditions. There's nothing revolutionary about my ability to perfectly drive with my knees...I just very carefully selected the conditions where I was willing to do it.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      You may have that perfect safety record, but other people don't. People still crash every day in good conditions. That's thousands of lives that could be saved with our imperfect, sunny weather on the highway only self driving car. You underestimate how bad human drivers are even in perfect conditions.
      - saosebastiao 10y ago
dmritard96 10y ago
beyond the obviousness of what you have overlooked, its also worth pointing out that not all autonomous car usage will be substitutive. What if i just send my autonomous car to go take a picture of something? I might not have done it before, but now I will because it only costs a few cents/mile and none of my time.
- uw_rob 10y ago
  Another really cool use case will be sending your car to drive around the block for an hour or go back to your house and park, while you are going out to places. Beats paying the $10 to park for an hour.
  - Kadin 10y ago
    Lots of interesting effects there, all the way up to basic urban land-use decisions. Suddenly the price people will pay for parking is going to be closely related to the price of gas. The maximum value of a parking space in the city is basically the cost to send the car back out to some suburban parking garage during the day and have it come back in later for you. My guess is that the market-clearing price is going to be a lot lower than it is today. Lots of urban parking structures might end up getting repurposed for other uses, if you can't fill them at hundreds of dollars per space per month. In the short run I could see the average self-driving car's gas usage being higher than a conventional car's, but in the longer run the same self-driving features might make fully electric cars more palatable. Long charging times don't really matter if you can let the car go and charge itself while you're at work, for e.g.
    - tonyarkles 10y ago
      And if that place that it goes to charge itself happens to have a pile of solar and wind, even better! Way easier to do a bit installation in a less populated area than right in the centre of downtown.

Proof that so-called autopilot systems are a danger to the public would be evidence that they perform worse than the average driver. I haven't seen such evidence, what are you referencing?

TeMPOraL 10y ago

It's the other way around - you need a proof that they perform comparable to an average driver during expected use, and they do not have absurdly stupid corner cases during actually expected use.

lutorm 10y ago
Well, humans have absurdly stupid corner cases during actual use, too. It depends on how small the corner is, I think.
- thfuran 10y ago
  Yes and humans require certification before they are permitted to drive vehicles on public roadways.
  - strathmeyer 10y ago
    To get that certification, do they test you first, or do they wait for you to screw up and then take it away from you??
    - azinman2 10y ago
      We know, being humans, and that we have the ability to process lots of complex information in a way that's very difficult for computers to replicate. Hard AI doesn't actually exist (yet). We also have a 100 years of humans driving cars worldwide so we understand well what they're good at and what they're not, so laws & safety designs take all of this into consideration. Each computer system will be encountering new, diverse things in the real world without a good understanding of how they'll perform. There are lots of crazy hard problems here that no one has solved yet. So to suggest we just automatically trust it because humans make mistakes is foolish when the consequences are so high. If someone came out with a surgery "autopilot" tomorrow, would you suggest it start giving triple bypass surgeries right away without FDA approval because humans make errors too?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        One of the features of the common human firmware is self-preservation instinct. It lets us trust that our fellow drivers, while still prone to mistakes, won't generally make obviously suicidal errors. Can one say the same about a new ML algorithm running on some board designed half a decade ago? How exactly would one know, without a thorough audit?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      They test you first, but if despite passing the test you screw up sufficiently badly later they decertify you. It's a belt-and-suspenders system.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  We've been dealing with those corner cases for thousands of years and we know them pretty well. Given that we all run on pretty much the same hardware and firmware (with minor differences), you could say humans have been thoroughly tested for few millennia, including a hundred or so years of road testing. So yeah, I a bit of thorough testing of a completely new hardware running completely new software isn't too much to ask for.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

digler999 10y ago

so we should wait till a statistically-significant percentage of people die before we tell everyone, "yep, definitely dangerous. Lets add some regulation" ? I wonder if they could shut him down on the basis of car insurance requirements and the legal definition of "driver". If "driver" is defined as the "person" inputting control commands, then either you dont consider the computer a person, and then nobody is legally "driving" the car, or else the software somehow meets the definition of a "person" or driver, in which case its an unlicensed driver operating the vehicle and insurance may not have to cover it.

smallnamespace 10y ago
The NHTSA has been a strong proponent of self-driving technology and has gone out of its way to make sure there is a path to doing it legally, without pulling the legal 'gotcha' that you described here. The device would probably be SAE Level 2, and should be regulated as such.

saosebastiao 10y ago

When you measure the safety of autonomous cars by counting the miles they travel, and not counting the miles that they intentionally avoid or defer to a human, you have succeeded in creating a metric that looks like it's useful for comparison, but is actually completely meaningless. It's like measuring typing speed while ignoring typos. Until autonomous vehicles are subject to the full spectrum of conditions that human drivers face, incidents/mile is not a meaningful measure of comparative safety. And until then, the burden of proof should be on the creators.

stale2002 10y ago
Not true. Lots of accidents happen in "good" conditions because humans suck at driving. The way you compare, is you give a self driving car to a person, and compare actually usage for that person, and see if owning a self driving car increases or reduces accidents for that person. Being perfect only half the time is still revolutionary.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  I have a 100% perfect safety record over probably hundreds of thousands of miles of driving a class B truck with my knees instead of my hands, using cruise control, on straight empty highways in Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, with perfect weather and good road conditions. There's nothing revolutionary about my ability to perfectly drive with my knees...I just very carefully selected the conditions where I was willing to do it.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    You may have that perfect safety record, but other people don't. People still crash every day in good conditions. That's thousands of lives that could be saved with our imperfect, sunny weather on the highway only self driving car. You underestimate how bad human drivers are even in perfect conditions.
    - saosebastiao 10y ago

dmritard96 10y ago

beyond the obviousness of what you have overlooked, its also worth pointing out that not all autonomous car usage will be substitutive. What if i just send my autonomous car to go take a picture of something? I might not have done it before, but now I will because it only costs a few cents/mile and none of my time.

uw_rob 10y ago
Another really cool use case will be sending your car to drive around the block for an hour or go back to your house and park, while you are going out to places. Beats paying the $10 to park for an hour.
- Kadin 10y ago
  Lots of interesting effects there, all the way up to basic urban land-use decisions. Suddenly the price people will pay for parking is going to be closely related to the price of gas. The maximum value of a parking space in the city is basically the cost to send the car back out to some suburban parking garage during the day and have it come back in later for you. My guess is that the market-clearing price is going to be a lot lower than it is today. Lots of urban parking structures might end up getting repurposed for other uses, if you can't fill them at hundreds of dollars per space per month. In the short run I could see the average self-driving car's gas usage being higher than a conventional car's, but in the longer run the same self-driving features might make fully electric cars more palatable. Long charging times don't really matter if you can let the car go and charge itself while you're at work, for e.g.
  - tonyarkles 10y ago
    And if that place that it goes to charge itself happens to have a pile of solar and wind, even better! Way easier to do a bit installation in a less populated area than right in the centre of downtown.