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I'm going to say something that I suspect many will quietly agree with but may not be willing to say out loud. I'm confident that self-driving cars will eventu

I'm going to say something that I suspect many will quietly agree with but may not be willing to say out loud. I'm confident that self-driving cars will eventually be safer than human driven ones. I'm not confident that this can be realistically achieved without killing some unfortunate bystanders in the process of getting to that point. That doesn't mean we should accept these cars running amok killing people all over the place. It doesn't mean I think this specific case involving Uber is "reasonable" either. I just think, in a general sense, a realist has to be able to try to find some balance between short term lives lost and long term lives saved.

mcny 9y ago
I absolutely agree that some lives will be lost in the name of progress. I also hate the NIMBY ism showing up in these threads. However, I don't care for Uber or its ambition. I'm more worried that Uber's negligence will set the whole industry back with a public backlash.
- scoggs 9y ago
  I think the most uncomfortable part that people won't bring up is the fact that cars are essentially high speed, high weight metal death machines on wheels. Just a quick Google search and the first results give me this info: >Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44. From this page: http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet... Of course unmanned driving tests will happen at a very, very small fraction of the amount compared with manned drivers we have to pull stats from but I don't think it will take long, if the unmanned tests persist enough to conjure up the required amount of data needed to make a legitimate comparison to prove that unmanned driving will be markedly safer.
  - selectodude 9y ago
    >Over 90% of all road fatalities occur in low and middle-income countries, which have less than half of the world's vehicles. The only person who died in a road fatality in phoenix that day was killed by a self driving car.
    - lmm 9y ago
      And how about in the rest of Arizona and/or the rest of the week?
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  To be clear, I personally don't espouse these "NIMBY"ist ideas, I'm just pointing out that they exist and that they will be a real problem for widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles. Uber, with their recklessness, is inflaming them a lot.
eternal_july 9y ago
Well, an obvious question to ask is if you are honestly prepared that it is your or your relatives' lives, that are lost in the name of progress / long term gain? Perhaps, it is easier to speak of things like "short term life lost vs long term life's saved", as long as it is other people losing lives.
- kolinko 9y ago
  To rephrase the question - are you prepared to slightly increase chances of injury of your family for the next 5-10 years, if leads to drastically increasing their safety after 5-10 years, and forever after? You have to be quite shortsighted to say "no".
  - mijamo 9y ago
    This is not rephrasing, this is changing the question to something completely different and wrong. In addition, not providing any data there or alternative is just misleading. Ex: I would NOT accept increasing the risk by 10 in the next 5 years to reduce it by 30% afterwards. I would NOT accept increasing the risk by 2 during 5 years if we could instead just increase it by 5% during 10 years and get the same result. I would NOT accept even having the same probability if we could first learn more and take 2 more years and a few billions to get a more stable technology before launch.
    - emiliobumachar 9y ago
      The point is, the "what if it is your family" appeal goes both ways. The downside of a laissez-faire policy towards self-driving cars could fall on anyone, but so does the upside.
- rayiner 9y ago
  That’s basically inviting the reader to discard their rationality and answer emotionally.
kayoone 9y ago
The problem is that the general public will not accept deaths caused by machines even if they are statistically safer. As an example, the German government gave in to public pressure after Fukushima and decided to shut down all nuclear power plants even though total death rate of coal power is A LOT higher and this event did not even happen in their own continent. If stuff like this continues to happen, i can see some government banning self driving tech for the foreseeable future.
- cm2187 9y ago
  It's actually the same with terrorism, school shootings and plane crashes. They are all statistically insignificant compared to other causes of non natural death, starting with common assaults, drownings and road accidents. But they monopolise the headlines and create an irrational fear.
  - ahussain 9y ago
    I wonder if there is a Simpson's paradox effect at play here, and that it is rationally sensible to be more afraid of planes than cars. Even though in absolute terms there are more deaths by automobile, that is also because people are typically around cars more frequently than they are on planes. I.e. any given school shooting or plane ride IS more risky than any given bath or car journey, but the latter occur much more frequently. Not sure exactly what the numbers are.
    - jonawesomegreen 9y ago
      Some statistics [1] for travel in the US: Cars & trucks 5.75 deaths per billion miles Commercial airlines 0.06 deaths per billion miles So airlines are a couple orders of magnitude safer by miles traveled. In my own personal case I put about 10,000 miles on my car each year, and I travel about 50,000 - 80,000 miles on an airplane. So airlines are still safer as I don't travel 2 orders of magnitude farther on them. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/news/economy/train-plane-car-deaths/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/news/economy/train-plane-car...
Tossrock 9y ago
It can be realistically achieved, because it already has been achieved. Self-driving cars done right are already safer than humans - see Waymo's record. The woman didn't die today to somehow save people tomorrow. She died to fuel Uber's business ambitions.
- masklinn 9y ago
  Waymo's record is only "safer than humans" because they haven't had a fatality yet and thus get 0/x, anything can be "safer than humans" by that count. I looked up what numbers I could find, according to the OECD's Road Safety Annual Report 2016, in 2014 the US averaged about one death per 150 million vehicle-kilometers (vkm) (6.7 killed per billion vkm). According to Waymo's own page on the subject, they have driven "more than 5 million miles" (8mvkm) since 2009[0] and they seem to be by far the lead vkm producer in the autonomous space[1]. Just to be as safe as 2014 US human driving they need to clock in an other 140mvkm with no more than one fatality, and even then that could be debated to be in more selected conditions than human driving. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in autonomous driving and I think it would be a great, great thing, but saying it is already safer than human driving is at best misleading. [0] https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ [1] 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...
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Yep, it's like the study done by US government on the chances of accidental detonation of any of their nuclear weapons - and basically the study concluded that the chances are zero, because it hasn't happened yet(the study also found that the cold-war era weapons had no locks, no redundant fail safe mechanisms, and could be detonated by literally anyone who got their hands on one - but hey, none of them were so they must be safe!)
gambiting 9y ago
The thing is that any other industry that works like this(we have to accept some people will be hurt/die to achieve progress) - like the medical testing industry - is extremely heavily regulated and most crucially, all participants in testing are consenting to being tested. Letting autonomous cars on public roads is testing it on people who have not consented being tested on. If I get hit by an autonomous car I really don't care that thanks to this Uber/Google/Waymo/Whoever gets to improve their algorithm. I don't care how they want to do it - but I don't want them testing this stuff on public roads.
- kolinko 9y ago
  Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation? Medical industry is heavily regulated now, but regulations appeared after it has grown in size. Similarly transport, construction, and anything else I could think of. The reason it happens this way is that it's hard to set up standards and practices for something that is entirely new - when you set them up too soon, they may end up impossible to achieve, and block innovation altogether.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Plus you would have a selection bias. High regulations induce much larger upfront costs. That would kill most of these nescent industries. So industries that would fall under heavy regulation now just never see the light of the day. It was actually Peter Thiel's grief against over regulation. It kills creativity in domains that are much more important to mankind than websites.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    >>Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation? The issue here is that almost every industry began in times when we collectively didn't give much shit until things went wrong. If you wanted to make a watch factory using radium - sure, go ahead. It was only after people started dying that we figured out that maybe this needs regulation. But if you wanted to make a commercial product in 2018 using radium you would have to go through plenty of hoops, and rightfully so. I don't see why autonomous cars are any different - I don't see why we're starting with the assumption that it's fine to test this without strict regulation applied to everything else automotive. Like, if you wanted to start a startup making new tyres using a revolutionary compound, it would not be allowed to just go ahead on public roads - they would need to pass extremely strict testing that we apply to tyres since they are a life/death kind of component. But autonomous cars are allowed as-is right now? With a failure mode where the car literally doesn't react at all to a person crossing the road, despite having 4(!) sets of sensors used to detect this exact kind of obstacle? That is an engineering failure of the worst kind. The law tried to make it better by requiring a driver behind the wheel - but that's still clearly not enough.
kmonsen 9y ago
Clearly it cannot be achieved without killing someone since it has already happened now :-(

mcny 9y ago

I absolutely agree that some lives will be lost in the name of progress. I also hate the NIMBY ism showing up in these threads. However, I don't care for Uber or its ambition. I'm more worried that Uber's negligence will set the whole industry back with a public backlash.

scoggs 9y ago
I think the most uncomfortable part that people won't bring up is the fact that cars are essentially high speed, high weight metal death machines on wheels. Just a quick Google search and the first results give me this info: >Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44. From this page: http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet... Of course unmanned driving tests will happen at a very, very small fraction of the amount compared with manned drivers we have to pull stats from but I don't think it will take long, if the unmanned tests persist enough to conjure up the required amount of data needed to make a legitimate comparison to prove that unmanned driving will be markedly safer.
- selectodude 9y ago
  >Over 90% of all road fatalities occur in low and middle-income countries, which have less than half of the world's vehicles. The only person who died in a road fatality in phoenix that day was killed by a self driving car.
  - lmm 9y ago
    And how about in the rest of Arizona and/or the rest of the week?
CydeWeys 9y ago
To be clear, I personally don't espouse these "NIMBY"ist ideas, I'm just pointing out that they exist and that they will be a real problem for widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles. Uber, with their recklessness, is inflaming them a lot.

eternal_july 9y ago

Well, an obvious question to ask is if you are honestly prepared that it is your or your relatives' lives, that are lost in the name of progress / long term gain? Perhaps, it is easier to speak of things like "short term life lost vs long term life's saved", as long as it is other people losing lives.

kolinko 9y ago
To rephrase the question - are you prepared to slightly increase chances of injury of your family for the next 5-10 years, if leads to drastically increasing their safety after 5-10 years, and forever after? You have to be quite shortsighted to say "no".
- mijamo 9y ago
  This is not rephrasing, this is changing the question to something completely different and wrong. In addition, not providing any data there or alternative is just misleading. Ex: I would NOT accept increasing the risk by 10 in the next 5 years to reduce it by 30% afterwards. I would NOT accept increasing the risk by 2 during 5 years if we could instead just increase it by 5% during 10 years and get the same result. I would NOT accept even having the same probability if we could first learn more and take 2 more years and a few billions to get a more stable technology before launch.
  - emiliobumachar 9y ago
    The point is, the "what if it is your family" appeal goes both ways. The downside of a laissez-faire policy towards self-driving cars could fall on anyone, but so does the upside.
rayiner 9y ago
That’s basically inviting the reader to discard their rationality and answer emotionally.

kayoone 9y ago

The problem is that the general public will not accept deaths caused by machines even if they are statistically safer. As an example, the German government gave in to public pressure after Fukushima and decided to shut down all nuclear power plants even though total death rate of coal power is A LOT higher and this event did not even happen in their own continent. If stuff like this continues to happen, i can see some government banning self driving tech for the foreseeable future.

cm2187 9y ago
It's actually the same with terrorism, school shootings and plane crashes. They are all statistically insignificant compared to other causes of non natural death, starting with common assaults, drownings and road accidents. But they monopolise the headlines and create an irrational fear.
- ahussain 9y ago
  I wonder if there is a Simpson's paradox effect at play here, and that it is rationally sensible to be more afraid of planes than cars. Even though in absolute terms there are more deaths by automobile, that is also because people are typically around cars more frequently than they are on planes. I.e. any given school shooting or plane ride IS more risky than any given bath or car journey, but the latter occur much more frequently. Not sure exactly what the numbers are.
  - jonawesomegreen 9y ago
    Some statistics [1] for travel in the US: Cars & trucks 5.75 deaths per billion miles Commercial airlines 0.06 deaths per billion miles So airlines are a couple orders of magnitude safer by miles traveled. In my own personal case I put about 10,000 miles on my car each year, and I travel about 50,000 - 80,000 miles on an airplane. So airlines are still safer as I don't travel 2 orders of magnitude farther on them. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/news/economy/train-plane-car-deaths/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/news/economy/train-plane-car...

Tossrock 9y ago

It can be realistically achieved, because it already has been achieved. Self-driving cars done right are already safer than humans - see Waymo's record. The woman didn't die today to somehow save people tomorrow. She died to fuel Uber's business ambitions.

masklinn 9y ago
Waymo's record is only "safer than humans" because they haven't had a fatality yet and thus get 0/x, anything can be "safer than humans" by that count. I looked up what numbers I could find, according to the OECD's Road Safety Annual Report 2016, in 2014 the US averaged about one death per 150 million vehicle-kilometers (vkm) (6.7 killed per billion vkm). According to Waymo's own page on the subject, they have driven "more than 5 million miles" (8mvkm) since 2009[0] and they seem to be by far the lead vkm producer in the autonomous space[1]. Just to be as safe as 2014 US human driving they need to clock in an other 140mvkm with no more than one fatality, and even then that could be debated to be in more selected conditions than human driving. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in autonomous driving and I think it would be a great, great thing, but saying it is already safer than human driving is at best misleading. [0] https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ [1] 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...
- gambiting 9y ago
  Yep, it's like the study done by US government on the chances of accidental detonation of any of their nuclear weapons - and basically the study concluded that the chances are zero, because it hasn't happened yet(the study also found that the cold-war era weapons had no locks, no redundant fail safe mechanisms, and could be detonated by literally anyone who got their hands on one - but hey, none of them were so they must be safe!)

gambiting 9y ago

The thing is that any other industry that works like this(we have to accept some people will be hurt/die to achieve progress) - like the medical testing industry - is extremely heavily regulated and most crucially, all participants in testing are consenting to being tested. Letting autonomous cars on public roads is testing it on people who have not consented being tested on. If I get hit by an autonomous car I really don't care that thanks to this Uber/Google/Waymo/Whoever gets to improve their algorithm. I don't care how they want to do it - but I don't want them testing this stuff on public roads.

kolinko 9y ago
Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation? Medical industry is heavily regulated now, but regulations appeared after it has grown in size. Similarly transport, construction, and anything else I could think of. The reason it happens this way is that it's hard to set up standards and practices for something that is entirely new - when you set them up too soon, they may end up impossible to achieve, and block innovation altogether.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Plus you would have a selection bias. High regulations induce much larger upfront costs. That would kill most of these nescent industries. So industries that would fall under heavy regulation now just never see the light of the day. It was actually Peter Thiel's grief against over regulation. It kills creativity in domains that are much more important to mankind than websites.
- gambiting 9y ago
  >>Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation? The issue here is that almost every industry began in times when we collectively didn't give much shit until things went wrong. If you wanted to make a watch factory using radium - sure, go ahead. It was only after people started dying that we figured out that maybe this needs regulation. But if you wanted to make a commercial product in 2018 using radium you would have to go through plenty of hoops, and rightfully so. I don't see why autonomous cars are any different - I don't see why we're starting with the assumption that it's fine to test this without strict regulation applied to everything else automotive. Like, if you wanted to start a startup making new tyres using a revolutionary compound, it would not be allowed to just go ahead on public roads - they would need to pass extremely strict testing that we apply to tyres since they are a life/death kind of component. But autonomous cars are allowed as-is right now? With a failure mode where the car literally doesn't react at all to a person crossing the road, despite having 4(!) sets of sensors used to detect this exact kind of obstacle? That is an engineering failure of the worst kind. The law tried to make it better by requiring a driver behind the wheel - but that's still clearly not enough.

kmonsen 9y ago

Clearly it cannot be achieved without killing someone since it has already happened now :-(