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Do you have statistics that per kilometre it makes stupid mistakes more than a human driver? Lots of human caused accidents were driving into obvious things to

Do you have statistics that per kilometre it makes stupid mistakes more than a human driver? Lots of human caused accidents were driving into obvious things too. I don't drive drunk or sleepy, so maybe I'm above average, but my only standard for safety for a self driving car is that it's safer than me driving.

gambiting 9y ago
It's absolutely irrelevant if it crashes "less" than a human driver. It just cannot fail to detect an obstacle in front of it to be allowed on the road, period. If there is any edge case where that can happen, then the car shouldn't be certified as safe to use. Like, I don't understand how it's not obvious. A heart surgery machine that kills the patient every once in a 1000 operations would be taken off the market faster than you can say "litigation", even if a human surgeon has a worse survival rate(say 1 in 100 operations, so lets say the machine is an order of magnitude safer). That has already happened with radiotheraphy machines, there was a model that on average definitely saved lives but it had a failure mode where it would kill a person. Would you continue using it? Of course not. Or airplanes - autopilot in planes has contributed tremendously to improving flying safety, but every time there is a crash under autopilot both Boeing and Airbus will ground every single plane of the same type to figure out the cause, they don't just go "oh well, it's still safer than flying manually so it's good for us". I really don't understand this notion that an autonomous car merely needs to be "better than average driver" to be allowed on the road. Absolutely disagree here.
- Tade0 9y ago
  Here's a justification for you: It's impossible to get a failure rate of 0, so there has to be a point where we get a satisfactory(for now) level of safety. Traffic kills so many people annually, that even a slight increase in safety is going to save more lives that are lost to aircraft accidents, radiotheraphy machine failure and such.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Of course, and I acknowledge that accidents will happen anyway. But we cannot have a car that is on the road with "autonomous" driving functionality when it is known that the sensors can't detect an obstacle above half-pillar height(like in that famous tesla crash), or that the lane detection can fail in intense sunlight(like dozens of videos on Youtube show). It should have no known failure states upon release, and then ones which are found should be fixed later. I'm just worried that we're in such a rush to release autonomous cars on the road that we are ignoring known issues for the sake of improving average safety on the road - literally no other industry works like this.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      How many other industries have such a high potential for saving lives by improving average safety? Traffic kills more than 80000 people every year in the EU.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        Would you rather have a large chance of your car driving into something it couldn't detect and a slightly smaller chance of being seriously injured or the status quo? Keep in mind that the odds of being seriously injured in a car crash in one's lifetime are already fairly low. How many people do you know that were seriously injured in a vehicle crash? Most of the safety of AI comes from it being implemented in vehicles that are already far safer than average.
        adrianN 9y ago
        I'd rather have the solution with fewer serious accidents, even if it introduces types of accidents that don't happen with human drivers. I know a handful of people who were seriously injured in traffic.
        gambiting 9y ago
        I think accidents in traffic will be completely 100% solved by brake assist and collision prevention systems - I think they are meant to be mandatory in all new cars sold in US by 2020 if I remember correctly? So not long now. AI solves a different category of problems and isn't really necessary to solve crashes when there is a lot of cars driving close to each other.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  Once in a while the hot water tap will blow scalding steam on your hands, but the average temperature is nice. (Do you feel lucky?)
- rkangel 9y ago
  My argument with your radiotherapy machine is that we're currently using the 'model that on average saves lives', and therefore anything we can replace it with that 'on average saves slightly _more_ lives' is an improvement.
- Strom 9y ago
  What you describe sounds like an irrational fear of machines, or perhaps fear of change? Let's take airbags as an example. Do you understand why airbags are allowed, or do you also find it obvious that airbags shouldn't be certified as safe to use? Airbags provide increased passenger safety on a statistical basis, as they mostly provide a cushion for impact. However there are plenty of edge cases where if you sit too close to an airbag, or let your small child sit next to an airbag, then that airbag will actually cause significant damage that wouldn't happen without the airbag. Autonomous driving can be viewed from the same safety perspective as airbags. Sure there are new edge cases that can cause harm, but on a statistical basis if the AI is even just slightly safer than a human, then at the end of the day there will be fewer accidents and fewer deaths. -- Your airplane example is a straw man argument. Nobody has claimed that we should stop advancing AI driving tech once we slightly surpass human skills. That's just the point where it makes sense to allow it on public roads.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    It's not about the number of edge cases, it's about the overall result. Airbags reduce variance in outcome. They hit a lot of people who would otherwise be unharmed in the fact with a small explosion in order to save a few lives in serious accidents. The worst case is better and the average case is better because you've eliminated some outliers. However,the median is far worse. The group is effectively being punished to reduce the effect of the worst performing members. An AI that drives into a partial lane obstruction is only better than no AI for a very small number of cases.
larksimian 9y ago
Sample size is too small to tell. However, if you ignore that, Tesla's Autopilot is at least 2-3 times worse than the average human in a passenger vehicle. And it only gets worse if you restrict further to middle aged people in expensive vehicles. Source: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1106613_how-safe-is-tesla-autopilot-parsing-the-statistics-as-suggested-by-elon-musk/ http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1106613_how-safe-is-tesl... Stats are on low page 2 and high page 3. TLDR: Tesla compared their numbers to a statistic that includes much more dangerous forms of transport(bike, 18-wheelers, whatever). The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety did a study on just driver fatalities in passenger vehicles(cars and light trucks) and came up with 1 fatality / 438 million miles driven. Versus the Tesla figure of 1 / 130 million miles. Whole article is worth reading as it goes into more detail on statistical issues with Tesla's safety statistic claims. I'll add that human driving ability is not uniformly distributed. Most accidents are due to particular demographic groups: people that drink and drive, teenagers. It's entirely possible for a self-driving car to be worse at driving than most humans, while still better than the average. In that scenario getting really bad drivers into self-driving cars would improve average accident numbers, but getting non-bad drivers(aka the majority of drivers) into self-driving cars would make average accident numbers worse.

gambiting 9y ago

It's absolutely irrelevant if it crashes "less" than a human driver. It just cannot fail to detect an obstacle in front of it to be allowed on the road, period. If there is any edge case where that can happen, then the car shouldn't be certified as safe to use. Like, I don't understand how it's not obvious. A heart surgery machine that kills the patient every once in a 1000 operations would be taken off the market faster than you can say "litigation", even if a human surgeon has a worse survival rate(say 1 in 100 operations, so lets say the machine is an order of magnitude safer). That has already happened with radiotheraphy machines, there was a model that on average definitely saved lives but it had a failure mode where it would kill a person. Would you continue using it? Of course not. Or airplanes - autopilot in planes has contributed tremendously to improving flying safety, but every time there is a crash under autopilot both Boeing and Airbus will ground every single plane of the same type to figure out the cause, they don't just go "oh well, it's still safer than flying manually so it's good for us". I really don't understand this notion that an autonomous car merely needs to be "better than average driver" to be allowed on the road. Absolutely disagree here.

Tade0 9y ago
Here's a justification for you: It's impossible to get a failure rate of 0, so there has to be a point where we get a satisfactory(for now) level of safety. Traffic kills so many people annually, that even a slight increase in safety is going to save more lives that are lost to aircraft accidents, radiotheraphy machine failure and such.
- gambiting 9y ago
  Of course, and I acknowledge that accidents will happen anyway. But we cannot have a car that is on the road with "autonomous" driving functionality when it is known that the sensors can't detect an obstacle above half-pillar height(like in that famous tesla crash), or that the lane detection can fail in intense sunlight(like dozens of videos on Youtube show). It should have no known failure states upon release, and then ones which are found should be fixed later. I'm just worried that we're in such a rush to release autonomous cars on the road that we are ignoring known issues for the sake of improving average safety on the road - literally no other industry works like this.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    How many other industries have such a high potential for saving lives by improving average safety? Traffic kills more than 80000 people every year in the EU.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      Would you rather have a large chance of your car driving into something it couldn't detect and a slightly smaller chance of being seriously injured or the status quo? Keep in mind that the odds of being seriously injured in a car crash in one's lifetime are already fairly low. How many people do you know that were seriously injured in a vehicle crash? Most of the safety of AI comes from it being implemented in vehicles that are already far safer than average.
      - adrianN 9y ago
        I'd rather have the solution with fewer serious accidents, even if it introduces types of accidents that don't happen with human drivers. I know a handful of people who were seriously injured in traffic.
        gambiting 9y ago
        I think accidents in traffic will be completely 100% solved by brake assist and collision prevention systems - I think they are meant to be mandatory in all new cars sold in US by 2020 if I remember correctly? So not long now. AI solves a different category of problems and isn't really necessary to solve crashes when there is a lot of cars driving close to each other.
B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
Once in a while the hot water tap will blow scalding steam on your hands, but the average temperature is nice. (Do you feel lucky?)
rkangel 9y ago
My argument with your radiotherapy machine is that we're currently using the 'model that on average saves lives', and therefore anything we can replace it with that 'on average saves slightly _more_ lives' is an improvement.
Strom 9y ago
What you describe sounds like an irrational fear of machines, or perhaps fear of change? Let's take airbags as an example. Do you understand why airbags are allowed, or do you also find it obvious that airbags shouldn't be certified as safe to use? Airbags provide increased passenger safety on a statistical basis, as they mostly provide a cushion for impact. However there are plenty of edge cases where if you sit too close to an airbag, or let your small child sit next to an airbag, then that airbag will actually cause significant damage that wouldn't happen without the airbag. Autonomous driving can be viewed from the same safety perspective as airbags. Sure there are new edge cases that can cause harm, but on a statistical basis if the AI is even just slightly safer than a human, then at the end of the day there will be fewer accidents and fewer deaths. -- Your airplane example is a straw man argument. Nobody has claimed that we should stop advancing AI driving tech once we slightly surpass human skills. That's just the point where it makes sense to allow it on public roads.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  It's not about the number of edge cases, it's about the overall result. Airbags reduce variance in outcome. They hit a lot of people who would otherwise be unharmed in the fact with a small explosion in order to save a few lives in serious accidents. The worst case is better and the average case is better because you've eliminated some outliers. However,the median is far worse. The group is effectively being punished to reduce the effect of the worst performing members. An AI that drives into a partial lane obstruction is only better than no AI for a very small number of cases.

larksimian 9y ago

Sample size is too small to tell. However, if you ignore that, Tesla's Autopilot is at least 2-3 times worse than the average human in a passenger vehicle. And it only gets worse if you restrict further to middle aged people in expensive vehicles. Source: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1106613_how-safe-is-tesla-autopilot-parsing-the-statistics-as-suggested-by-elon-musk/ http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1106613_how-safe-is-tesl... Stats are on low page 2 and high page 3. TLDR: Tesla compared their numbers to a statistic that includes much more dangerous forms of transport(bike, 18-wheelers, whatever). The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety did a study on just driver fatalities in passenger vehicles(cars and light trucks) and came up with 1 fatality / 438 million miles driven. Versus the Tesla figure of 1 / 130 million miles. Whole article is worth reading as it goes into more detail on statistical issues with Tesla's safety statistic claims. I'll add that human driving ability is not uniformly distributed. Most accidents are due to particular demographic groups: people that drink and drive, teenagers. It's entirely possible for a self-driving car to be worse at driving than most humans, while still better than the average. In that scenario getting really bad drivers into self-driving cars would improve average accident numbers, but getting non-bad drivers(aka the majority of drivers) into self-driving cars would make average accident numbers worse.