4 ms·
There's a big difference: commercial pilots are highly trained, even-tempered, and take their job seriously. Most drivers are lazy, distracted, and apt to do so
by tlb 9y ago
There's a big difference: commercial pilots are highly trained, even-tempered, and take their job seriously. Most drivers are lazy, distracted, and apt to do something stupid in an emergency. It's very hard to make something safer than a commercial pilot. It's much easier to make something safer than a typical driver.
- erobbins 9y agoYeah that validates his point. If the arguably most highly trained vehicle operators around lose situational awareness and fail to recover after automation fails, what do you think will happen with untrained drivers?
- bdamm 9y agoThat's actually a confirmation bias being missed. Aircraft systems fail and commercial pilots take over and land without mishap all the time. Components inside airplanes, at airports, and even inside air traffic control can and do fail. One example is the attack on the Chicago air traffic control system. Dozens and perhaps even over a hundred aircraft suddenly were flying around with no oversight. Every single pilot took local control, negotiated with the other pilots, and collectively were able to either land or divert without incident.
- archagon 9y ago> Most drivers are lazy, distracted, and apt to do something stupid in an emergency. Er, citation needed. I think the vast majority of drivers are good drivers — otherwise, vehicular transport would be a disaster.
- titanomachy 9y agoYeah, that's true at least where I live. Most times I drive I'll see someone do something stupid or inattentive (or even do something stupid myself!), but I see thousands of people driving normally, i.e. driving well. Countless times I've seen pedestrians or cyclists throw themselves in front of traffic without warning, and every time the drivers have stopped without incident. A collision is by far the more exceptional case.
- tlb 9y agoThere are around 1.25M vehicle fatalities every year worldwide [0]. It is a disaster. Driving has killed more people than the world wars. "Good drivers" -- we have no benchmark to measure against. Maybe it's amazing that 10x more people aren't killed, or maybe it's dismal that anyone is killed at all. When we have autonomous vehicles, we'll have a reference to compare against. I predict that "bad" will be the only word to describe the current situation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
- throw2016 9y agomost drivers are lazy, distracted and accident prone. If this had any element of truth roads would be empty. This kind of sweeping and bigoted dismissal of other people is a bit too self serving in the context of self driving cars and is made too casually and too often on HN now to allow balanced discussion.
- reubenswartz 9y agoI agree. I think it will be very hard to make something that drives better than a really good human driver who is focused on driving. Getting better than the 50+% of people I see with their phone clapped to their faces while they drive (despite that being illegal in Austin) is much easier (though still difficult) task. The other thing is that something going wrong with a plane in the air is a pretty big deal. You can't just pull over and wait. If you assume a "first, do no harm" principle of robotics for driverless cars, the failure mode should in most cases by "pull over and wait." This can still cause problems in many situations, but people do it now.