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> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as someone walking out into the road. Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads. That's an invalid conclusion to draw from this accident. There were 34,439 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2016 in which 37,461 deaths occurred. This resulted in 11.6 deaths per 100,000 people and 1.16 deaths per 100 million miles traveled.[1] As far as I know, the instance this article is about is the first death in an autonomous vehicle accident, meaning that all the 2016 accidents were humans driving. Why is it that you see one death from an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars aren't ready to be driving, but you see 37,461 deaths from human drivers and don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I admit that there just aren't enough autonomous cars on the road to prove conclusively that autonomous cars are safer than human-operated cars at this point. But there's absolutely no statistical evidence I know of that indicates the opposite. [1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... EDIT: Let's be clear here: I'm not saying autonomous cars are safer than human drivers. I'm saying that one can't simply look at one death caused by an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars are less safe.

cryptoz 9y ago
> don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I'm not sure I see anyone here making that conclusion. I think you're the only one who's brought it up. For one, I personally sure as fuck do not think humans are ready to be driving. > That's an invalid conclusion to draw from this accident. The conclusion was not invalid at all. Other self-driving car companies have driven more miles than Uber has and they have done so safely. Uber has even taken its cars off the road, so even Uber agrees that their self-driving cars are not ready for the roads yet. It is also important to take into account what Uber is like when it comes to safety and responsibility. They have knowingly hired convicted rapists for drivers, they have ridiculed and mocked and attempted to discredit their paying customers who have been raped by their employees/drivers, they have spied on journalists, they have completely disregarded human safety on numerous accounts. A company with a track record like Uber's probably not should be granted a license to experiment with technology like these self-driving cars on public roads. They just aren't responsible enough.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > I'm not sure I see anyone here making that conclusion. I think you're the only one who's brought it up. Look at the post I'm responding to, and the section I quoted. > Uber has even taken its cars off the road, so even Uber agrees that their self-driving cars are not ready for the roads yet. Uber avoiding a PR nightmare should not be taken as Uber thinking their self-driving cars aren't ready. > It is also important to take into account what Uber is like when it comes to safety and responsibility. They have knowingly hired convicted rapists for drivers, they have ridiculed and mocked and attempted to discredit their paying customers who have been raped by their employees/drivers, they have spied on journalists, they have completely disregarded human safety on numerous accounts. A company with a track record like Uber's probably not should be granted a license to experiment with technology like these self-driving cars on public roads. I'm not defending Uber as a whole. I think in general they're a fairly typical rent-seeking middle man whose only real innovation has been figuring out a way to break the law ambiguously enough to get away with it (admittedly, a law I don't agree with). I don't even necessarily think autonomous vehicles are a good thing. I just think that if you're going to criticize autonomous vehicles, safety isn't the criticism I'd level against them, because it's not backed up by the evidence when compared to how unsafe human drivers are.
chillingeffect 9y ago
1 July 2016 "Tesla driver dies in first fatal autonomous car crash in US" https://www.newscientist.com/article/2095740-tesla-driver-dies-in-first-fatal-autonomous-car-crash-in-us/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2095740-tesla-driver-di...
jdmichal 9y ago
He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. This all ties to regulation allowing these vehicles to drive on public roads, because that regulation was permitted due to the above hypothesis and hopeful expectations that it would be true. Obviously, I haven't seen the entirety of the data set to know fatalities per car-mile. Which would be the relevant statistic here. I also didn't see such a number in your post, which I'm assuming means you are probably not aware either. But simply providing the numbers for the null hypothesis doesn't do anything.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. > The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. These two paragraphs are so contradictory to each other that I'm just not even sure how to attempt to correct your confusion.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. They are already built into the equation, by virtue of being the null hypothesis. So you can argue that hypothesis, but that's not what your comment did. Your comment stated some numbers for the null hypothesis, but had no numbers for the hypothesis under test, and so therefore didn't really mean much at all. I'd like to note that I am not the person you replied to, and I personally am not arguing that any program should be shut down based on this one incident. But it's certainly not encouraging that the autonomous vehicle seems to have failed a test at which everyone would have expected it to perform well at. Also, to quote from your previous post: > Why is it that you see one death from an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars aren't ready to be driving, but you see 37,461 deaths from human drivers and don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I think we conclude, quite often in fact, that individual humans aren't fit to be driving. Death is one of those scenarios that will quickly lead to such a conclusion. One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario. So this is perhaps more akin to saying that this particular driver is not fit for the task, except that this particular driver happens to be driving dozens or more vehicles all at once.
vasilipupkin 9y ago
you have to take into account miles driven. Yes, we have 37K fatalities, but trillions of miles driven. So, it comes out something like 1.2 fatalities per 100 million miles driven for human drivers. Which means, so far, self driving cars have a worse record per 100 million miles driven. So far.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  I haven't been able to find any reliable source of miles driven by self-driving cars to make that claim, but if one exists it wouldn't surprise me. But that's not really my point. My point isn't that self-driving cars are safer, it's that merely looking at one car accident doesn't prove that self-driving cars are less safe.
  - vasilipupkin 9y ago
    as of today, yes, the data indicates that self driving cars are less safe. The fact is, as of today, self driving cars are generating more fatalities per mile driven than human drivers. That may change in the future as technology matures.
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      I'd love to see the data you're talking about, but even if such data exists, that doesn't make extrapolating from this one accident any more valid.
      - vasilipupkin 9y ago
        https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self-driven-miles-b28f32de495a https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self-driving-cars-2-million-miles/#36723a72a4fe https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self... so, 6 million miles driven and one fatality is significantly worse record than human drivers. So far.
rimliu 9y ago
If solution does not solve anything, what's the point of the „solution“? Most of the deaths on the road I hear in my country are the result of someone doing something really reckless and stupid. „Normal“ drivers do not kill themselves or others. So if self-driving car is only as good as a dumb driver — I do not want these cars on the road. Also, interetingly enough there is little talk about human driver assisted by technology, not replaced by it. For some reason it is binary: either humand driver or self-driving. How about some human drivers plus collsion avoidance system, infrared sensing system (way too many people die there simply becaue they walk on the road in the dark without any reflectors/lights), etc.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > If solution does not solve anything, what's the point of the „solution“? Most of the deaths on the road I hear in my country are the result of someone doing something really reckless and stupid. „Normal“ drivers do not kill themselves or others. So if self-driving car is only as good as a dumb driver — I do not want these cars on the road. If self-driving cars are between dumb drivers and normal drivers, and self-driving cars take dumb drivers off the road, it may be a net positive.
  - c22 9y ago
    Not if they also take normal drivers off the road...
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      That depends how many dumb drivers it takes off the road compared to normal drivers, and the relative percentages of accidents caused by each. Let's say we have 9 normal drivers and 1 dumb driver. The 9 normal drivers cause 0 accidents per year each, and the 1 dumb driver causes 15 accidents per year. Let's say autonomous cars cause 1 accident per year. If autonomous cars replace all the drivers, there's 10 accidents per year instead of 15. Obviously these are hypothetical numbers. All I'm saying is that if you only have one of these numbers, you don't know which kind of driver is safer.
Thisisdense 9y ago
Maybe because the ratio of self driving cars to human driven cars is 1:100000000 ?
danso 9y ago
As of late 2017, Waymo/Google reported having driven a total of 4 million miles on roads. Given that Waymo is one of the biggest players, it's hard to see how all of autonomous cars have driven 100 million miles at this point. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-self-driven-miles/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-s... Nevermind that the initial rollouts almost always involve locales in which driving conditions are relatively safe (e.g. nice weather and infrastructure). Nevermind that the vast majority of autonomous testing so far has involved the presence of a human driver, and that there have been hundreds of disengagements: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s... Humans may be terrible at driving, but the stats are far from being in favor of autonomous vehicles. Which is to be expected given the early stage of the tech.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  My point is that "the stats" don't exist if you're only looking at one autonomous car accident without comparing it to the relevant statistics from human accidents.
  - danso 9y ago
    If the stats don't exist then what was your whole basis for making an argument? On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving? That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving. That's fine, we don't have to consider just fatal accidents: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s... > One result of the sharp increase in GM’s number of miles driven is a plethora of accidents. The auto giant’s autonomous cars were involved in 22 fender benders over the course of the reporting period (and two more in 2018). That’s one crash for every 5,985 miles of testing.
    - 9y ago
Twisell 9y ago
Actually there was a metric of accident per distance drived. It was often pull out by Tesla before their first fatal accident last year (IA didn’t saw rear of truck because of sun or smthg like that). This metric was often decried because it had poor statistical significance. It would however be nice to update this metric according to this death. Maybe now this metric would indicate that IA are more dangerous than human, will be interesting if the perception of this flawed metric will evolve in reaction...
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > Actually there was a metric of accident per distance drived. It was often pull out by Tesla before their first fatal accident last year (IA didn’t saw rear of truck because of sun or smthg like that). I'm curious to see that, do you have a link? That would actually be a valid comparison.
  - Twisell 9y ago
    I’m on my phone so maybe I haven’t found the most relevants links, but I found the followings. This is Elon musk bragging before the first autopilot accident : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/25/elon-musk-teslas-autopilot-makes-accidents-50pc-less-likely/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/25/elon-musk-... This is a counterpoint with some fact: http://safer-america.com/safe-self-driving-cars/ http://safer-america.com/safe-self-driving-cars/ And concerning the crash, last update seemed to point driver’s fault... with autopilot... don’t know if final ruling is already out: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/20/the-driver-who-died-in-a-tesla-crash-using-autopilot-ignored-7-safety-warnings/?utm_term=.b642ac5f665f https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/20...
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      Neat, thanks for the data.
    - rohit2412 9y ago
      According to that "update", Tesla Autopilot can never be at fault right? Because the driver is supposed to be in charge. So, even if Tesla rams full speed into a semi, the driver is at fault!
brbrodude 9y ago
Apples and oranges.

cryptoz 9y ago

> don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I'm not sure I see anyone here making that conclusion. I think you're the only one who's brought it up. For one, I personally sure as fuck do not think humans are ready to be driving. > That's an invalid conclusion to draw from this accident. The conclusion was not invalid at all. Other self-driving car companies have driven more miles than Uber has and they have done so safely. Uber has even taken its cars off the road, so even Uber agrees that their self-driving cars are not ready for the roads yet. It is also important to take into account what Uber is like when it comes to safety and responsibility. They have knowingly hired convicted rapists for drivers, they have ridiculed and mocked and attempted to discredit their paying customers who have been raped by their employees/drivers, they have spied on journalists, they have completely disregarded human safety on numerous accounts. A company with a track record like Uber's probably not should be granted a license to experiment with technology like these self-driving cars on public roads. They just aren't responsible enough.

kerkeslager 9y ago
> I'm not sure I see anyone here making that conclusion. I think you're the only one who's brought it up. Look at the post I'm responding to, and the section I quoted. > Uber has even taken its cars off the road, so even Uber agrees that their self-driving cars are not ready for the roads yet. Uber avoiding a PR nightmare should not be taken as Uber thinking their self-driving cars aren't ready. > It is also important to take into account what Uber is like when it comes to safety and responsibility. They have knowingly hired convicted rapists for drivers, they have ridiculed and mocked and attempted to discredit their paying customers who have been raped by their employees/drivers, they have spied on journalists, they have completely disregarded human safety on numerous accounts. A company with a track record like Uber's probably not should be granted a license to experiment with technology like these self-driving cars on public roads. I'm not defending Uber as a whole. I think in general they're a fairly typical rent-seeking middle man whose only real innovation has been figuring out a way to break the law ambiguously enough to get away with it (admittedly, a law I don't agree with). I don't even necessarily think autonomous vehicles are a good thing. I just think that if you're going to criticize autonomous vehicles, safety isn't the criticism I'd level against them, because it's not backed up by the evidence when compared to how unsafe human drivers are.

chillingeffect 9y ago

1 July 2016 "Tesla driver dies in first fatal autonomous car crash in US" https://www.newscientist.com/article/2095740-tesla-driver-dies-in-first-fatal-autonomous-car-crash-in-us/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2095740-tesla-driver-di...

jdmichal 9y ago

He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. This all ties to regulation allowing these vehicles to drive on public roads, because that regulation was permitted due to the above hypothesis and hopeful expectations that it would be true. Obviously, I haven't seen the entirety of the data set to know fatalities per car-mile. Which would be the relevant statistic here. I also didn't see such a number in your post, which I'm assuming means you are probably not aware either. But simply providing the numbers for the null hypothesis doesn't do anything.

kerkeslager 9y ago
> He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. > The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. These two paragraphs are so contradictory to each other that I'm just not even sure how to attempt to correct your confusion.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. They are already built into the equation, by virtue of being the null hypothesis. So you can argue that hypothesis, but that's not what your comment did. Your comment stated some numbers for the null hypothesis, but had no numbers for the hypothesis under test, and so therefore didn't really mean much at all. I'd like to note that I am not the person you replied to, and I personally am not arguing that any program should be shut down based on this one incident. But it's certainly not encouraging that the autonomous vehicle seems to have failed a test at which everyone would have expected it to perform well at. Also, to quote from your previous post: > Why is it that you see one death from an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars aren't ready to be driving, but you see 37,461 deaths from human drivers and don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I think we conclude, quite often in fact, that individual humans aren't fit to be driving. Death is one of those scenarios that will quickly lead to such a conclusion. One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario. So this is perhaps more akin to saying that this particular driver is not fit for the task, except that this particular driver happens to be driving dozens or more vehicles all at once.

vasilipupkin 9y ago

you have to take into account miles driven. Yes, we have 37K fatalities, but trillions of miles driven. So, it comes out something like 1.2 fatalities per 100 million miles driven for human drivers. Which means, so far, self driving cars have a worse record per 100 million miles driven. So far.

kerkeslager 9y ago
I haven't been able to find any reliable source of miles driven by self-driving cars to make that claim, but if one exists it wouldn't surprise me. But that's not really my point. My point isn't that self-driving cars are safer, it's that merely looking at one car accident doesn't prove that self-driving cars are less safe.
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  as of today, yes, the data indicates that self driving cars are less safe. The fact is, as of today, self driving cars are generating more fatalities per mile driven than human drivers. That may change in the future as technology matures.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    I'd love to see the data you're talking about, but even if such data exists, that doesn't make extrapolating from this one accident any more valid.
    - vasilipupkin 9y ago
      https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self-driven-miles-b28f32de495a https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self-driving-cars-2-million-miles/#36723a72a4fe https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self... so, 6 million miles driven and one fatality is significantly worse record than human drivers. So far.

rimliu 9y ago

If solution does not solve anything, what's the point of the „solution“? Most of the deaths on the road I hear in my country are the result of someone doing something really reckless and stupid. „Normal“ drivers do not kill themselves or others. So if self-driving car is only as good as a dumb driver — I do not want these cars on the road. Also, interetingly enough there is little talk about human driver assisted by technology, not replaced by it. For some reason it is binary: either humand driver or self-driving. How about some human drivers plus collsion avoidance system, infrared sensing system (way too many people die there simply becaue they walk on the road in the dark without any reflectors/lights), etc.

kerkeslager 9y ago
> If solution does not solve anything, what's the point of the „solution“? Most of the deaths on the road I hear in my country are the result of someone doing something really reckless and stupid. „Normal“ drivers do not kill themselves or others. So if self-driving car is only as good as a dumb driver — I do not want these cars on the road. If self-driving cars are between dumb drivers and normal drivers, and self-driving cars take dumb drivers off the road, it may be a net positive.
- c22 9y ago
  Not if they also take normal drivers off the road...
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    That depends how many dumb drivers it takes off the road compared to normal drivers, and the relative percentages of accidents caused by each. Let's say we have 9 normal drivers and 1 dumb driver. The 9 normal drivers cause 0 accidents per year each, and the 1 dumb driver causes 15 accidents per year. Let's say autonomous cars cause 1 accident per year. If autonomous cars replace all the drivers, there's 10 accidents per year instead of 15. Obviously these are hypothetical numbers. All I'm saying is that if you only have one of these numbers, you don't know which kind of driver is safer.

Thisisdense 9y ago

Maybe because the ratio of self driving cars to human driven cars is 1:100000000 ?

danso 9y ago

As of late 2017, Waymo/Google reported having driven a total of 4 million miles on roads. Given that Waymo is one of the biggest players, it's hard to see how all of autonomous cars have driven 100 million miles at this point. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-self-driven-miles/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-s... Nevermind that the initial rollouts almost always involve locales in which driving conditions are relatively safe (e.g. nice weather and infrastructure). Nevermind that the vast majority of autonomous testing so far has involved the presence of a human driver, and that there have been hundreds of disengagements: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s... Humans may be terrible at driving, but the stats are far from being in favor of autonomous vehicles. Which is to be expected given the early stage of the tech.

kerkeslager 9y ago
My point is that "the stats" don't exist if you're only looking at one autonomous car accident without comparing it to the relevant statistics from human accidents.
- danso 9y ago
  If the stats don't exist then what was your whole basis for making an argument? On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving? That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving. That's fine, we don't have to consider just fatal accidents: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s... > One result of the sharp increase in GM’s number of miles driven is a plethora of accidents. The auto giant’s autonomous cars were involved in 22 fender benders over the course of the reporting period (and two more in 2018). That’s one crash for every 5,985 miles of testing.
  - 9y ago

Twisell 9y ago

Actually there was a metric of accident per distance drived. It was often pull out by Tesla before their first fatal accident last year (IA didn’t saw rear of truck because of sun or smthg like that). This metric was often decried because it had poor statistical significance. It would however be nice to update this metric according to this death. Maybe now this metric would indicate that IA are more dangerous than human, will be interesting if the perception of this flawed metric will evolve in reaction...

kerkeslager 9y ago
> Actually there was a metric of accident per distance drived. It was often pull out by Tesla before their first fatal accident last year (IA didn’t saw rear of truck because of sun or smthg like that). I'm curious to see that, do you have a link? That would actually be a valid comparison.
- Twisell 9y ago
  I’m on my phone so maybe I haven’t found the most relevants links, but I found the followings. This is Elon musk bragging before the first autopilot accident : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/25/elon-musk-teslas-autopilot-makes-accidents-50pc-less-likely/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/25/elon-musk-... This is a counterpoint with some fact: http://safer-america.com/safe-self-driving-cars/ http://safer-america.com/safe-self-driving-cars/ And concerning the crash, last update seemed to point driver’s fault... with autopilot... don’t know if final ruling is already out: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/20/the-driver-who-died-in-a-tesla-crash-using-autopilot-ignored-7-safety-warnings/?utm_term=.b642ac5f665f https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/20...
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Neat, thanks for the data.
  - rohit2412 9y ago
    According to that "update", Tesla Autopilot can never be at fault right? Because the driver is supposed to be in charge. So, even if Tesla rams full speed into a semi, the driver is at fault!

brbrodude 9y ago

Apples and oranges.