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There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving

There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving tech. It's great stuff, but I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane, and I wish there were a way to jump right to that mired, bureaucratic point in car tech. Similarly, I used to view lawsuits as a menace to free enterprise, but I'm a tiny bit comforted by the fact that everyone working on car tech knows they're extremely exposed to litigation if they aren't diligent. The idea of code from Apple or Google driving on my roads is switching me from classical liberalism to "help me, big government!"

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
But there is so much low-hanging fruit in automated driving! People are really pretty bad at responding to road hazards, anomalies (dog runs into road) etc. Also people are terrible at attending to repetitive tasks. And people fall asleep. Its arguable (measurable) that automated drivers would be safer than human drivers. Resisting this is simple FUD?
- criddell 9y ago
  > Resisting this is simple FUD? There's some psychology at work as well. Say self-driving cars cut the road accident and fatality rate in half but in the remaining incidents, half of those are driver error but the rest are all due to hardware and software problems. I think a lot of people would have a problem if half of all fatalities are due to system glitches even if the net result is fewer deaths and I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    It will also be somewhat new ground. As I've noted before, there are relatively few examples of consumer-facing technologies/products where properly maintained and used (or sometimes even misused) products kill and maim--and people are just fine with that because "stuff happens" and the cost/benefit is reasonable. Drug interactions are one of the relatively few areas today and even those often lead to lawsuits. (And the US even basically indemnifies drug companies against side effects from standard childhood vaccines.)
    - criddell 9y ago
      Maybe self-driving car companies should be indemnified for anything other than gross-negligence until the technology matures a little.
      - MBCook 9y ago
        That will probably have to happen at some point. My big concern is we’ve seen how reckless companies have been (Samsung with Note 7 batteries, Facebook/Twitter with the election, AirBNB(?) with reviews about unsafe places, Uber with basically everything...) I don’t want those companies making self driving cars without strong oversight. ‘Move fast and break things’ has done a lot of damage over the last few years. I don’t want them to be allowed to apply that strategy to cars. We couldn’t trust their judgement for simpler things, the risk is way too high for cars.
    - nsgi 9y ago
      Cigarettes are probably the best example, they look a lot more people than cars.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        They're an example although I would argue that, in this case, "properly used" equates to not used at all. Also cigarettes were the subject of long drawn-out legal cases and a substantial settlement so they're something of a unique product.
  - leadingthenet 9y ago
    > I think a lot of people would have a problem if half of all fatalities are due to system glitches even if the net result is fewer deaths and I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. Why is it not unreasonable?
    - MBCook 9y ago
      Because you’re preventing 30k deaths that would have happened but causing 8k that wouldn’t... it seems fair for people to be mad about that 8k. Maybe we shouldn’t have rushed into things until that number was way smaller. ‘Diverless cars cause 30% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline.
      - leadingthenet 9y ago
        It’s still a huge net reduction in deaths anyway you look at it, and there are huge gains in other areas (speed, covenience). I remain very unmoved by that argument. I’d rather be hit by software than a human. At least I know we did as much as we could to alleviate the problem.
        MBCook 9y ago
        I’m not arguing it’s perfectly logical. If people behaved that way the sunk cost fallacy wouldn’t exist. I think it would be a real problem. If the death count becomes non-trivial before the death count from people becomes relatively trivial I think there’s will be a big mess in the media.
      - gowld 9y ago
        It's all in the spin: ‘Drivered cars cause 70% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline for drivers.
        MBCook 9y ago
        That’s not new. Right now that number is 100%. People just accept it as status quo. But people would be outraged by the 30% number.
johngalt 9y ago
I understand the reluctance to trust new technology. If we are talking about the risk/cost of new developments, we should not forget the baseline costs we pay today. Self driving car tech will be the only method that can provide a hundred fold decrease in driving fatalities. Slowing down progress has a cost too.
- mononcqc 9y ago
  You could also just reduce driving deaths by having better public transportation and reducing driving overall. Sounds like it would even be better in the long run.
  - tristanstcyr 9y ago
    Or you could do both. The right tool for the job.
  - TehCorwiz 9y ago
    Self driving public transportation could provide the benefits of both.
    - lorenzhs 9y ago
      Driverless trains have been here for a while. They're great. With platform-edge doors, nobody can fall or jump onto the track, not to mention that they increase brake cooling efficiency and decrease air resistance (less air to push). But of course you weren't talking about trains. I see this sentiment a lot on HN that self driving cars are going to fix everyone's transportation woes, but I'm not convinced that they will. For example, they're never going to be particularly efficient at really high speeds, due to tyre wear (due to heat) and air resistance (which can be reduced by driving in a convoy, but not enough). Rail (or maybe hyperloop, who knows) will still be much more efficient for high-speed travel, not to mention much faster. So maybe the cars will all be going 40% faster on highways than nowadays, which is nice, but still only half of what rail can do, and even less for hyperloops. I don't buy the "it's gonna fix everyone's commute", either, because at the same time it's supposed to fix parking. So now you have loads of cars driving out of the city to park at the same time as you've got just as many driving into it. Sure, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and superhuman reaction times will allow for increased density on roads, but is it enough to offset the increase in traffic? And is the increase in miles driven and resulting road maintenance cost factored into the cost calculations? Damn right I want cars to drive themselves, and it's going to be fantastic. But I don't think autonomous cars are the panacea that many seem to see in them.
rockinghigh 9y ago
In the US alone, 35000 people die and more than 2 million are injured every year in car crashes. Technology is our best hope to reduce these numbers. Airbags, blind spot detection, lane keeping, emergency braking can all contribute. Self-driving level 5 will not suddenly appear and work everywhere in every situation. It’s a gradual process. Another thing to keep in mind is that insurers will not insure these cars for cheap until they are safer than humans.
- chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
  Technology has helped a great deal. I'm saddened that enforcement hasn't played a bigger part, though. What I see around me on a daily basis is pure complacency. People switching lanes without turn signals, drivers with half their car in the bike-lane, tailgating, people who have their blinker on for several minutes (how did they forget? are they blasting music in their car such that they can't hear the clicking noise? are they that distracted??) etc. It feels like my fellow drivers simply don't care about the human life that surrounds them. They'd rather text their friends than pay attention to the several-thousand-pound machine they are operating. In my opinion, obtaining and keeping a driver's license is just far too easy in the U.S., but I guess there is no hope to fix things on this end for two reasons: (1) losing your privilege to drive a car is a "death sentence"... how will you get to work and pay the bills?, and (2) police departments are facing budget cuts, so enforcement probably will not increase. We have hope that self-driving cars will remove these negligent/distracted drivers from the road, but at the end of the day, what does that say about people that they can't take operating a heavy machine responsibly? Do we have any future tech that would emerge where ordinary people can threaten each other's lives? ... Also, road design in the U.S. appears to care more about throughput than safety. Traffic circles are far safer, but they aren't used enough. Anecdotally, near my hometown there is a 6-lane road intersecting an 8-lane (!) road. That is the most dangerous intersection in the town, and IIRC the county! It's no wonder why having so many lanes of cars hurling themselves through an intersection is dangerous, so why are people allowed to design these roads in the first place?
  - andrewfong 9y ago
    > (2) police departments are facing budget cuts, so enforcement probably will not increase. I would assume the opposite. Speeding tickets are a way for cash-strapped police departments to raise money (or justify their ROI to whomever controls the budget).
enraged_camel 9y ago
Regulations may slow down innovation, but they also protect against companies who try to socialize the externalities of their business activities. To me, full laissez-faire capitalism is a lot scarier than a system in which everything is overburdened with regulations.
akgerber 9y ago
The reason why consumer/enterprise software is so lightly regulated is that very few people die when mistakes are made. (Embedded, especially medical, is a different story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) Meanwhile, cars (and roadways designed for high speeds without proper pedestrian accommodations) have been the #1 cause of injury deaths for kids for generations: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html
- smokeyj 9y ago
  > The reason why consumer/enterprise software is so lightly regulated is that very few people die when mistakes are made So few people die because computers are nearly unregulated and mass manufactured. Computers are cheap and safe because we allow the market to function.
  - davidcbc 9y ago
    Based on what? What deaths is the lack of regulation preventing? How would they be more dangerous if they were regulated?
    - smokeyj 9y ago
      > How would they be more dangerous if they were regulated? Not necessarily more dangerous, but more expensive. Medical tourism anyone?
    - jack9 9y ago
      There's lots of unintended, expected, negative outcomes from regulation. The counter culture is unregulated experimentation like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298919/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298919/ An impetus to circumvent these regulations, in the extreme case to save lives (or just to be deviant). Regulation is like a wet blanket that can mold, but is effective at putting out a fire in a pinch, if it's big enough. Regulatory bodies never seem to have a path-to-dissolution process (the core of my problem with regulation) and are largely implemented in such a manner that they grow, self-perpetuate, morph and fester corruption for countless generations (e.g. FDA vs smoking tobacco). Admittedly, I'm biased by my beliefs. Despite being heavily regulated, I think much of the cancer epidemic is caused by auto and oil/fuel, with some contribution by Monsanto Roundup-like products. The independent studies, in these heavily regulated industries, are consistently squelched, influenced, or made unavailable (trade secrets!). Regulation is not a silver bullet.
jessriedel 9y ago
How so you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? Or do you really think the litigation system (where currently car manufactures almost are never liable) is properly tuned to minimize the time until that is achieved?
- pjc50 9y ago
  This all hinges on the unknowable of how safe the competing system will be. And how long it will take to roll out - a decade at absolute best before 50% of journeys are done with no human attention. Launching unsafe self-driving cars will delay the rollout as soon as the first big accident happens.
- iainmerrick 9y ago
  How do you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? I'd say, let's ban using your phone while driving and drinking before driving like many other countries did 10 and 20 years ago. That could save 15k of those people right away.
  - curioussavage 9y ago
    I’m pretty sure we have laws for that everywhere in the US
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    Over the past decades, phone usage has surged while deaths have fallen or stayed flat (modulo the miniscule uptick that was all over the news). Distracted driving is dangerous, but phones aren't contributing nearly that much (and it's mostly illegal). Drunk driving is super deadly, but it's already illegal. More importantly, self-driving cars will be vastly more effective at getting drunk drivers out from behind the wheel than all the legistlative in the world.
    - iainmerrick 9y ago
      Driving while using a phone is illegal in most areas, but still very common, just like speeding -- it clearly isn't being addressed very seriously. And standards for "drunk driving" vary a lot; sometimes you're allowed two or even three drinks before driving. Another commenter here linked to an excellent NYT article exploring this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an-outlier-on-driving-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an... The US had one of the world's lowest rates of driving deaths in 1990, but since then other countries have pulled ahead significantly. Why is that?
azernik 9y ago
I'm still uncomfortable with lawsuits, but mostly because they're really inefficient ways to enforce regulation. In most places, legislatures add an area to the remit of a regulator; in the US they create private causes of action.
smokeyj 9y ago
The streets where I live have giant pot holes. The government had the job of creating a flat surface. I got a surface with holes in it. If we had a competent government they could probably just upgrade the roads nation wide with smart sensors that cars can use for guiding - along with a integration module for car manufacturers to use. But we don't have that kind of competency, so for now we're stuck with Google and Apple.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
I know you just want to keep your family safe, me too. But consider my case. I have NO traffic tickets on my record, but I recently started taking a medication that could cause sudden blackouts. I am still allowed to drive. I also have an ADDICTION to mobile games. I try to limit my playing to stop lights, but if traffic seems light, I will try to get away with crushing a few candies while driving. Studies have shown this is MORE dangerous than drunk driving, but I don't feel like it is because again, I don't even have any tickets on my record. Yes, I have had a few close calls, and hit a few curbs, but I'm not stopping what I'm doing anytime soon. In fact I just got a mount for my dashboard so I can watch Youtube videos while I drive, so the problem is getting worse. I consider myself a good person, and a responsible person in general, but I will probably be responsible for a horrible accident at some point before I actually change my behavior. I'm hoping the self driving cars get here before that happens, because my attention holding skills and driving ability are on a serious downward trajectory. EDIT: To the people who got upset by this. I am sorry. This was Trollish behavior. I took patterns that I am seeing, and tried to personify them to make it more effective. You can see from some of my past posts, I have real concern about where smart phones are taking us, and I took my argument too far. I really did lose someone close to me because they were hit by a driver that was looking at a dick pic and not paying attention to the road. This has permanently effected my perspective on this issue. Also... the medication I was referring to was a normal SSRI Anti-depressant. These don't have any warnings about "operating heavy machinery", and are totally legal to take while driving. They don't cause black outs, but actual seizures in some people.
- berberous 9y ago
  I appreciate the honesty, and apologies if I am missing some sarcasm, but please do the world a favor and at least throw out the mount. You are aware of how negligent that behavior is. If you kill someone, it is inexcusable.
  - triplesec 9y ago
    GP comment is likely writing fictionally, as a hypothetical counter to the GGP.
poimpoij8878 9y ago
> There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving tech. IMO, this notion applies to garage tinkerers and should not apply to billionaires or their corporations The reasons should be obvious, but a garage tinkerer has a finite reach in whom his work can impact The same isn't true of the wealthy elite and corporations. Who very plainly have the ability, in modern society, to impact just about every human on the planet. It's as if, on one hand, we recognize government must be reigned in because of the immense reach of their power, but ignore the same problems when it's Bill Gates. Propaganda is a powerful thing.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Hate to break it to you, but your family is much more likely to get killed by their own mistake or the mistake or someone else (e.g. a drunk driver) than a self driving car.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jsight 9y ago
I don't see any particular reason to have more confidence in a government bureaucrat than in a lawsuit averse company, especially in the early stages.
mgleason_3 9y ago
There’s a simple explanation: You’re getting older, more conservative and more averse to change. It’s ok, it happens. As part of this you’re also likely over-estimating the danger and underestimating the benefits. I’m sure every self-driving car death will (and should be) scrutinized heavily. But remember there’s between 30,000 and 50,000 auto deaths every year. I’m betting self-driveing cars will do better.
- devwastaken 9y ago
  "I’m betting" Thats the problem. How do you know? When you have family, and people you care about, thats not 'conservative'. Thats the reality of being human. If 'change' means that consumers become the testing grounds for unsafe technologies, then yeah, I'll be plenty 'adverse to change'. These technologies do not require people to die to be made.
  - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
    Trying to find some good statistics but looking around it seems a majority of accidents end up being caused by human error, distracted driving and drunk driving. AI wouldn't have any of those so I'm personally confident that it'll have a much higher level of safety. The trouble is when we swap "human error" for "machine error". Because humans screw up all the time but a machine is going to fail in a way that'll likely be very obvious to us. That is going to be take an emotional toll, I think, and will be a hurdle to get over for self driving cars. No one wants to be told "sorry but your family died because of a bug in the car's software told it to make a left into a semi".
    - nawitus 9y ago
      "AI wouldn't have any of those so I'm personally confident that it'll have a much higher level of safety." AI and perfect AI are different things.
      - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
        Agreed but that doesn't make my statement incorrect :) I said AI wouldn't have the issues of human error, distracted and drunk driving. It opens up all new types of errors, sure, but it wouldn't have the biggest killers of people. So unless we screw up pretty badly here it almost has to be lower mortality rates.
DINKDINK 9y ago
>I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. Simple way to avoid that: Make a law that requires the CEO CTO and all the engineers and their family Who built the driverless cars To all drive around in their driverless cars / bike / walk around those driverless cars For a non negligible amount of time No reason they should take the upside and public takes the downside.
muraiki 9y ago
One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of the vehicles when compared to human-driven vehicles" https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/04/12.html https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/04/12.html That being said, RAND released a study this month, targeted at policymakers, that models how many human lives would be saved given the introduction of non-perfect autonomous vehicles, including a little javascript widget to try out various settings: https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-perfect-autonomous-vehicles-may-cost-lives.html https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-p... Crucially, this study models scenarios such as AVs being _half_ as safe as human drivers, yet still resulting in saving more lives over time. I think the question then becomes, who will be responsible for the missing 50% of safety when somebody gets killed by one? Edit: Another question: if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? I have no answers to these questions... it's a hard problem.
- gowld 9y ago
  > including a little javascript widget This is great. You can make any model say anything you want by tuning the parameters, so we needs researchers to stop forcing their preferred parameters, and let consumers check the robustness of the conclusions against ranges of parameters > if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? and if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing?
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    > if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? with a handful of centralized systems responsible for every accident everyone will be permanently panicked and outraged at its purportedly uncaring, greedy overlords. > if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing? counterfactuals need to be near and specific for people to give them much thought, see: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/Roese1997.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/Roese1997... http://www3.canyons.edu/faculty/rafterm/0%200LLI%20LOVEandLOSS/Day%206%20Files/1986%20-%20Norm%20Theory%20-%20Comparing%20Reality%20to%20Its%20Alternatives.pdf http://www3.canyons.edu/faculty/rafterm/0%200LLI%20LOVEandLO...
zamalek 9y ago
> It's great stuff, but I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. The problem with this analogy is that it's based on the assumption that we are not currently cracking any eggs. We are. Hundreds of thousands every year. Introducing AVs right now wouldn't increase that number at worst; realistically it would likely decrease it. Your family of eggs is at a far greater risk because we are holding back. That's how atrocious humans are at driving (and making decision to get behind the wheel drunk) - we evolved to roam and climb trees at less than 10mph, so you can't blame us. Stop overestimating our ability, though.
patrickaljord 9y ago
> I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that? > I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane Wow, someone who actually believes in security theatre aka airport security. The litterature is so vast on the uselessness of the TSA and the water bottle ban and co that I shouldn't even bother posting it here but here you go https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-homeland-security_n_7485558.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-perce... > I used to view lawsuits as a menace to free enterprise, but I'm a tiny bit comforted by the fact that everyone working on car tech knows they're extremely exposed to litigation if they aren't diligent Even in a world with no regulations there would still be private arbitrations and if a company is responsible for a death they would still get sued to hell. > The idea of code from Apple or Google driving on my roads is switching me from classical liberalism to "help me, big government!" Oh boy.
- eridius 9y ago
  > Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that? Self-driving cars are more dangerous to the other people sharing the road than the passengers in them.
  - Fricken 9y ago
    There's no statistically useful data on that and there won't be for some time.
    - eridius 9y ago
      Well the point I was trying to make was that cars are a danger to everyone else on the road, not just to their passengers, so you can't just say "don't get a self-driving car" in response to someone talking about the risks of self-driving cars, as you can't control whether any of the other cars on the road are self-driving cars.
    - 9y ago
vadimberman 9y ago
The brave eggs will likely live in 3rd world countries with roads even worse than those in the US and drivers magnitude more insane. Most likely, it will take a while until the locals understand the value of the training data to tax / sell it, so the vendors will have it nearly for free.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

But there is so much low-hanging fruit in automated driving! People are really pretty bad at responding to road hazards, anomalies (dog runs into road) etc. Also people are terrible at attending to repetitive tasks. And people fall asleep. Its arguable (measurable) that automated drivers would be safer than human drivers. Resisting this is simple FUD?

criddell 9y ago
> Resisting this is simple FUD? There's some psychology at work as well. Say self-driving cars cut the road accident and fatality rate in half but in the remaining incidents, half of those are driver error but the rest are all due to hardware and software problems. I think a lot of people would have a problem if half of all fatalities are due to system glitches even if the net result is fewer deaths and I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.
- ghaff 9y ago
  It will also be somewhat new ground. As I've noted before, there are relatively few examples of consumer-facing technologies/products where properly maintained and used (or sometimes even misused) products kill and maim--and people are just fine with that because "stuff happens" and the cost/benefit is reasonable. Drug interactions are one of the relatively few areas today and even those often lead to lawsuits. (And the US even basically indemnifies drug companies against side effects from standard childhood vaccines.)
  - criddell 9y ago
    Maybe self-driving car companies should be indemnified for anything other than gross-negligence until the technology matures a little.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      That will probably have to happen at some point. My big concern is we’ve seen how reckless companies have been (Samsung with Note 7 batteries, Facebook/Twitter with the election, AirBNB(?) with reviews about unsafe places, Uber with basically everything...) I don’t want those companies making self driving cars without strong oversight. ‘Move fast and break things’ has done a lot of damage over the last few years. I don’t want them to be allowed to apply that strategy to cars. We couldn’t trust their judgement for simpler things, the risk is way too high for cars.
  - nsgi 9y ago
    Cigarettes are probably the best example, they look a lot more people than cars.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      They're an example although I would argue that, in this case, "properly used" equates to not used at all. Also cigarettes were the subject of long drawn-out legal cases and a substantial settlement so they're something of a unique product.
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  > I think a lot of people would have a problem if half of all fatalities are due to system glitches even if the net result is fewer deaths and I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. Why is it not unreasonable?
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Because you’re preventing 30k deaths that would have happened but causing 8k that wouldn’t... it seems fair for people to be mad about that 8k. Maybe we shouldn’t have rushed into things until that number was way smaller. ‘Diverless cars cause 30% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline.
    - leadingthenet 9y ago
      It’s still a huge net reduction in deaths anyway you look at it, and there are huge gains in other areas (speed, covenience). I remain very unmoved by that argument. I’d rather be hit by software than a human. At least I know we did as much as we could to alleviate the problem.
      - MBCook 9y ago
        I’m not arguing it’s perfectly logical. If people behaved that way the sunk cost fallacy wouldn’t exist. I think it would be a real problem. If the death count becomes non-trivial before the death count from people becomes relatively trivial I think there’s will be a big mess in the media.
    - gowld 9y ago
      It's all in the spin: ‘Drivered cars cause 70% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline for drivers.
      - MBCook 9y ago
        That’s not new. Right now that number is 100%. People just accept it as status quo. But people would be outraged by the 30% number.

johngalt 9y ago

I understand the reluctance to trust new technology. If we are talking about the risk/cost of new developments, we should not forget the baseline costs we pay today. Self driving car tech will be the only method that can provide a hundred fold decrease in driving fatalities. Slowing down progress has a cost too.

mononcqc 9y ago
You could also just reduce driving deaths by having better public transportation and reducing driving overall. Sounds like it would even be better in the long run.
- tristanstcyr 9y ago
  Or you could do both. The right tool for the job.
- TehCorwiz 9y ago
  Self driving public transportation could provide the benefits of both.
  - lorenzhs 9y ago
    Driverless trains have been here for a while. They're great. With platform-edge doors, nobody can fall or jump onto the track, not to mention that they increase brake cooling efficiency and decrease air resistance (less air to push). But of course you weren't talking about trains. I see this sentiment a lot on HN that self driving cars are going to fix everyone's transportation woes, but I'm not convinced that they will. For example, they're never going to be particularly efficient at really high speeds, due to tyre wear (due to heat) and air resistance (which can be reduced by driving in a convoy, but not enough). Rail (or maybe hyperloop, who knows) will still be much more efficient for high-speed travel, not to mention much faster. So maybe the cars will all be going 40% faster on highways than nowadays, which is nice, but still only half of what rail can do, and even less for hyperloops. I don't buy the "it's gonna fix everyone's commute", either, because at the same time it's supposed to fix parking. So now you have loads of cars driving out of the city to park at the same time as you've got just as many driving into it. Sure, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and superhuman reaction times will allow for increased density on roads, but is it enough to offset the increase in traffic? And is the increase in miles driven and resulting road maintenance cost factored into the cost calculations? Damn right I want cars to drive themselves, and it's going to be fantastic. But I don't think autonomous cars are the panacea that many seem to see in them.

rockinghigh 9y ago

In the US alone, 35000 people die and more than 2 million are injured every year in car crashes. Technology is our best hope to reduce these numbers. Airbags, blind spot detection, lane keeping, emergency braking can all contribute. Self-driving level 5 will not suddenly appear and work everywhere in every situation. It’s a gradual process. Another thing to keep in mind is that insurers will not insure these cars for cheap until they are safer than humans.

chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
Technology has helped a great deal. I'm saddened that enforcement hasn't played a bigger part, though. What I see around me on a daily basis is pure complacency. People switching lanes without turn signals, drivers with half their car in the bike-lane, tailgating, people who have their blinker on for several minutes (how did they forget? are they blasting music in their car such that they can't hear the clicking noise? are they that distracted??) etc. It feels like my fellow drivers simply don't care about the human life that surrounds them. They'd rather text their friends than pay attention to the several-thousand-pound machine they are operating. In my opinion, obtaining and keeping a driver's license is just far too easy in the U.S., but I guess there is no hope to fix things on this end for two reasons: (1) losing your privilege to drive a car is a "death sentence"... how will you get to work and pay the bills?, and (2) police departments are facing budget cuts, so enforcement probably will not increase. We have hope that self-driving cars will remove these negligent/distracted drivers from the road, but at the end of the day, what does that say about people that they can't take operating a heavy machine responsibly? Do we have any future tech that would emerge where ordinary people can threaten each other's lives? ... Also, road design in the U.S. appears to care more about throughput than safety. Traffic circles are far safer, but they aren't used enough. Anecdotally, near my hometown there is a 6-lane road intersecting an 8-lane (!) road. That is the most dangerous intersection in the town, and IIRC the county! It's no wonder why having so many lanes of cars hurling themselves through an intersection is dangerous, so why are people allowed to design these roads in the first place?
- andrewfong 9y ago
  > (2) police departments are facing budget cuts, so enforcement probably will not increase. I would assume the opposite. Speeding tickets are a way for cash-strapped police departments to raise money (or justify their ROI to whomever controls the budget).

enraged_camel 9y ago

Regulations may slow down innovation, but they also protect against companies who try to socialize the externalities of their business activities. To me, full laissez-faire capitalism is a lot scarier than a system in which everything is overburdened with regulations.

akgerber 9y ago

The reason why consumer/enterprise software is so lightly regulated is that very few people die when mistakes are made. (Embedded, especially medical, is a different story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) Meanwhile, cars (and roadways designed for high speeds without proper pedestrian accommodations) have been the #1 cause of injury deaths for kids for generations: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html

smokeyj 9y ago
> The reason why consumer/enterprise software is so lightly regulated is that very few people die when mistakes are made So few people die because computers are nearly unregulated and mass manufactured. Computers are cheap and safe because we allow the market to function.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  Based on what? What deaths is the lack of regulation preventing? How would they be more dangerous if they were regulated?
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    > How would they be more dangerous if they were regulated? Not necessarily more dangerous, but more expensive. Medical tourism anyone?
  - jack9 9y ago
    There's lots of unintended, expected, negative outcomes from regulation. The counter culture is unregulated experimentation like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298919/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298919/ An impetus to circumvent these regulations, in the extreme case to save lives (or just to be deviant). Regulation is like a wet blanket that can mold, but is effective at putting out a fire in a pinch, if it's big enough. Regulatory bodies never seem to have a path-to-dissolution process (the core of my problem with regulation) and are largely implemented in such a manner that they grow, self-perpetuate, morph and fester corruption for countless generations (e.g. FDA vs smoking tobacco). Admittedly, I'm biased by my beliefs. Despite being heavily regulated, I think much of the cancer epidemic is caused by auto and oil/fuel, with some contribution by Monsanto Roundup-like products. The independent studies, in these heavily regulated industries, are consistently squelched, influenced, or made unavailable (trade secrets!). Regulation is not a silver bullet.

jessriedel 9y ago

How so you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? Or do you really think the litigation system (where currently car manufactures almost are never liable) is properly tuned to minimize the time until that is achieved?

pjc50 9y ago
This all hinges on the unknowable of how safe the competing system will be. And how long it will take to roll out - a decade at absolute best before 50% of journeys are done with no human attention. Launching unsafe self-driving cars will delay the rollout as soon as the first big accident happens.
iainmerrick 9y ago
How do you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? I'd say, let's ban using your phone while driving and drinking before driving like many other countries did 10 and 20 years ago. That could save 15k of those people right away.
- curioussavage 9y ago
  I’m pretty sure we have laws for that everywhere in the US
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Over the past decades, phone usage has surged while deaths have fallen or stayed flat (modulo the miniscule uptick that was all over the news). Distracted driving is dangerous, but phones aren't contributing nearly that much (and it's mostly illegal). Drunk driving is super deadly, but it's already illegal. More importantly, self-driving cars will be vastly more effective at getting drunk drivers out from behind the wheel than all the legistlative in the world.
  - iainmerrick 9y ago
    Driving while using a phone is illegal in most areas, but still very common, just like speeding -- it clearly isn't being addressed very seriously. And standards for "drunk driving" vary a lot; sometimes you're allowed two or even three drinks before driving. Another commenter here linked to an excellent NYT article exploring this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an-outlier-on-driving-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an... The US had one of the world's lowest rates of driving deaths in 1990, but since then other countries have pulled ahead significantly. Why is that?

azernik 9y ago

I'm still uncomfortable with lawsuits, but mostly because they're really inefficient ways to enforce regulation. In most places, legislatures add an area to the remit of a regulator; in the US they create private causes of action.

smokeyj 9y ago

The streets where I live have giant pot holes. The government had the job of creating a flat surface. I got a surface with holes in it. If we had a competent government they could probably just upgrade the roads nation wide with smart sensors that cars can use for guiding - along with a integration module for car manufacturers to use. But we don't have that kind of competency, so for now we're stuck with Google and Apple.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

I know you just want to keep your family safe, me too. But consider my case. I have NO traffic tickets on my record, but I recently started taking a medication that could cause sudden blackouts. I am still allowed to drive. I also have an ADDICTION to mobile games. I try to limit my playing to stop lights, but if traffic seems light, I will try to get away with crushing a few candies while driving. Studies have shown this is MORE dangerous than drunk driving, but I don't feel like it is because again, I don't even have any tickets on my record. Yes, I have had a few close calls, and hit a few curbs, but I'm not stopping what I'm doing anytime soon. In fact I just got a mount for my dashboard so I can watch Youtube videos while I drive, so the problem is getting worse. I consider myself a good person, and a responsible person in general, but I will probably be responsible for a horrible accident at some point before I actually change my behavior. I'm hoping the self driving cars get here before that happens, because my attention holding skills and driving ability are on a serious downward trajectory. EDIT: To the people who got upset by this. I am sorry. This was Trollish behavior. I took patterns that I am seeing, and tried to personify them to make it more effective. You can see from some of my past posts, I have real concern about where smart phones are taking us, and I took my argument too far. I really did lose someone close to me because they were hit by a driver that was looking at a dick pic and not paying attention to the road. This has permanently effected my perspective on this issue. Also... the medication I was referring to was a normal SSRI Anti-depressant. These don't have any warnings about "operating heavy machinery", and are totally legal to take while driving. They don't cause black outs, but actual seizures in some people.

berberous 9y ago
I appreciate the honesty, and apologies if I am missing some sarcasm, but please do the world a favor and at least throw out the mount. You are aware of how negligent that behavior is. If you kill someone, it is inexcusable.
- triplesec 9y ago
  GP comment is likely writing fictionally, as a hypothetical counter to the GGP.

poimpoij8878 9y ago

> There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving tech. IMO, this notion applies to garage tinkerers and should not apply to billionaires or their corporations The reasons should be obvious, but a garage tinkerer has a finite reach in whom his work can impact The same isn't true of the wealthy elite and corporations. Who very plainly have the ability, in modern society, to impact just about every human on the planet. It's as if, on one hand, we recognize government must be reigned in because of the immense reach of their power, but ignore the same problems when it's Bill Gates. Propaganda is a powerful thing.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

Hate to break it to you, but your family is much more likely to get killed by their own mistake or the mistake or someone else (e.g. a drunk driver) than a self driving car.

deleted 9y ago
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jsight 9y ago

I don't see any particular reason to have more confidence in a government bureaucrat than in a lawsuit averse company, especially in the early stages.

mgleason_3 9y ago

There’s a simple explanation: You’re getting older, more conservative and more averse to change. It’s ok, it happens. As part of this you’re also likely over-estimating the danger and underestimating the benefits. I’m sure every self-driving car death will (and should be) scrutinized heavily. But remember there’s between 30,000 and 50,000 auto deaths every year. I’m betting self-driveing cars will do better.

devwastaken 9y ago
"I’m betting" Thats the problem. How do you know? When you have family, and people you care about, thats not 'conservative'. Thats the reality of being human. If 'change' means that consumers become the testing grounds for unsafe technologies, then yeah, I'll be plenty 'adverse to change'. These technologies do not require people to die to be made.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  Trying to find some good statistics but looking around it seems a majority of accidents end up being caused by human error, distracted driving and drunk driving. AI wouldn't have any of those so I'm personally confident that it'll have a much higher level of safety. The trouble is when we swap "human error" for "machine error". Because humans screw up all the time but a machine is going to fail in a way that'll likely be very obvious to us. That is going to be take an emotional toll, I think, and will be a hurdle to get over for self driving cars. No one wants to be told "sorry but your family died because of a bug in the car's software told it to make a left into a semi".
  - nawitus 9y ago
    "AI wouldn't have any of those so I'm personally confident that it'll have a much higher level of safety." AI and perfect AI are different things.
    - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
      Agreed but that doesn't make my statement incorrect :) I said AI wouldn't have the issues of human error, distracted and drunk driving. It opens up all new types of errors, sure, but it wouldn't have the biggest killers of people. So unless we screw up pretty badly here it almost has to be lower mortality rates.

DINKDINK 9y ago

>I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. Simple way to avoid that: Make a law that requires the CEO CTO and all the engineers and their family Who built the driverless cars To all drive around in their driverless cars / bike / walk around those driverless cars For a non negligible amount of time No reason they should take the upside and public takes the downside.

muraiki 9y ago

One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of the vehicles when compared to human-driven vehicles" https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/04/12.html https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/04/12.html That being said, RAND released a study this month, targeted at policymakers, that models how many human lives would be saved given the introduction of non-perfect autonomous vehicles, including a little javascript widget to try out various settings: https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-perfect-autonomous-vehicles-may-cost-lives.html https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-p... Crucially, this study models scenarios such as AVs being _half_ as safe as human drivers, yet still resulting in saving more lives over time. I think the question then becomes, who will be responsible for the missing 50% of safety when somebody gets killed by one? Edit: Another question: if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? I have no answers to these questions... it's a hard problem.

gowld 9y ago
> including a little javascript widget This is great. You can make any model say anything you want by tuning the parameters, so we needs researchers to stop forcing their preferred parameters, and let consumers check the robustness of the conclusions against ranges of parameters > if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? and if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing?
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  > if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? with a handful of centralized systems responsible for every accident everyone will be permanently panicked and outraged at its purportedly uncaring, greedy overlords. > if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing? counterfactuals need to be near and specific for people to give them much thought, see: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/Roese1997.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/Roese1997... http://www3.canyons.edu/faculty/rafterm/0%200LLI%20LOVEandLOSS/Day%206%20Files/1986%20-%20Norm%20Theory%20-%20Comparing%20Reality%20to%20Its%20Alternatives.pdf http://www3.canyons.edu/faculty/rafterm/0%200LLI%20LOVEandLO...

zamalek 9y ago

> It's great stuff, but I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. The problem with this analogy is that it's based on the assumption that we are not currently cracking any eggs. We are. Hundreds of thousands every year. Introducing AVs right now wouldn't increase that number at worst; realistically it would likely decrease it. Your family of eggs is at a far greater risk because we are holding back. That's how atrocious humans are at driving (and making decision to get behind the wheel drunk) - we evolved to roam and climb trees at less than 10mph, so you can't blame us. Stop overestimating our ability, though.

patrickaljord 9y ago

> I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that? > I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane Wow, someone who actually believes in security theatre aka airport security. The litterature is so vast on the uselessness of the TSA and the water bottle ban and co that I shouldn't even bother posting it here but here you go https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-homeland-security_n_7485558.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-perce... > I used to view lawsuits as a menace to free enterprise, but I'm a tiny bit comforted by the fact that everyone working on car tech knows they're extremely exposed to litigation if they aren't diligent Even in a world with no regulations there would still be private arbitrations and if a company is responsible for a death they would still get sued to hell. > The idea of code from Apple or Google driving on my roads is switching me from classical liberalism to "help me, big government!" Oh boy.

eridius 9y ago
> Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that? Self-driving cars are more dangerous to the other people sharing the road than the passengers in them.
- Fricken 9y ago
  There's no statistically useful data on that and there won't be for some time.
  - eridius 9y ago
    Well the point I was trying to make was that cars are a danger to everyone else on the road, not just to their passengers, so you can't just say "don't get a self-driving car" in response to someone talking about the risks of self-driving cars, as you can't control whether any of the other cars on the road are self-driving cars.
  - 9y ago

vadimberman 9y ago

The brave eggs will likely live in 3rd world countries with roads even worse than those in the US and drivers magnitude more insane. Most likely, it will take a while until the locals understand the value of the training data to tax / sell it, so the vendors will have it nearly for free.