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The root problem (as described by Taleb in "Skin In The Game", is: not all statistical probabilities are "ergodic" -- have no risk of Ruin or Extinction. The p

The root problem (as described by Taleb in "Skin In The Game", is: not all statistical probabilities are "ergodic" -- have no risk of Ruin or Extinction. The problem with saying that "our automatic driving system is much better than the average driver" and thus you should be good with allowing our system to drive, is that you are not exposed -- serially -- to the whims of some average driver. One "average driver" mistake and you're dead. No replays. Therefore, the compound "odds" are INCOMPUTABLE. Just like being paid $1,000,000 per trigger-pull to play Russian Roulette: you are not earning an average of $833,333.33 per try! On "average", over a pool of random 1-time players, sure. But you? You're guaranteed to be dead in a small number of plays. Non-ergodic and ergodic probabilities are incomparable. So; since automatic driving systems are non-ergodic, they must be dramatically better (ie. orders of magnitude better) than the "average driver" to be considered viable. I live in a part of the world where even cruise control is unusable for 6 months of the year. Automatic driving systems? Not even thinkable, except for perhaps a few days of the year, on a few simple portions of a few roads...

dragonwriter 9y ago
> So; since automatic driving systems are non-ergodic, they must be dramatically better (ie. orders of magnitude better) than the "average driver" to be considered viable. The risks from human drivers are also non-ergodic, so that suggests that if automatic driving systems are even minimally better than the average driver you should demand that every other driver be replaced with them without delay, because you will die sooner with human drivers on the road. Of course, you won't want to be replaced unless the automatic driver is better than you, and human drivers all think they are far above average. And that’s the real problem.
- pjkundert 9y ago
  The real problem is that, yes, human drivers ARE better than computers — for some unknown subset of driving. It’s that small subset of lethal mistakes you avoid by not letting your computer drive that makes all the difference. The computer must not just be better on average — people must know that it’s better overall, across all possible weird events that a human just might throw a Hail-Mary and survive!
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > It’s that small subset of lethal mistakes you avoid by not letting your computer drive that makes all the difference. The small subset of lethal mistakes you avoid by not letting yourself drive matter too... Here's what I think is really going on. There's a transition from "not good enough to trust with a human life" to "approximately as likely as a human to make a fatal mistake, even if in different ways" to "clearly less likely to cause a fatal accident than even a good human driver". But there's also a huge pot of money for whoever wins this market. So at least some players are pretending that they're further along the transition to "better than human", hoping that the market believes them. A second point: when we're in the state of "approximately as likely as a human to make a fatal mistake, even if in different ways", the humans look at the ways that the computer makes, and think: "That's a really stupid mistake to make. How could it be so dumb?" But just because the mistakes aren't ones that a human would make very often, that doesn't mean that the computer isn't on par with humans in terms of overall death rate. But the computer still looks bad on the mistakes it makes.
- dllthomas 9y ago
  > human drivers all think they are far above average. And that’s the real problem. This is often a joke, and there's some truth to it - people are often overconfident. But there certainly are individuals who think they are below average. It might be rare and still a market.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> So; since automatic driving systems are non-ergodic, they must be dramatically better (ie. orders of magnitude better) than the "average driver" to be considered viable. The risks from human drivers are also non-ergodic, so that suggests that if automatic driving systems are even minimally better than the average driver you should demand that every other driver be replaced with them without delay, because you will die sooner with human drivers on the road. Of course, you won't want to be replaced unless the automatic driver is better than you, and human drivers all think they are far above average. And that’s the real problem.

pjkundert 9y ago
The real problem is that, yes, human drivers ARE better than computers — for some unknown subset of driving. It’s that small subset of lethal mistakes you avoid by not letting your computer drive that makes all the difference. The computer must not just be better on average — people must know that it’s better overall, across all possible weird events that a human just might throw a Hail-Mary and survive!
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > It’s that small subset of lethal mistakes you avoid by not letting your computer drive that makes all the difference. The small subset of lethal mistakes you avoid by not letting yourself drive matter too... Here's what I think is really going on. There's a transition from "not good enough to trust with a human life" to "approximately as likely as a human to make a fatal mistake, even if in different ways" to "clearly less likely to cause a fatal accident than even a good human driver". But there's also a huge pot of money for whoever wins this market. So at least some players are pretending that they're further along the transition to "better than human", hoping that the market believes them. A second point: when we're in the state of "approximately as likely as a human to make a fatal mistake, even if in different ways", the humans look at the ways that the computer makes, and think: "That's a really stupid mistake to make. How could it be so dumb?" But just because the mistakes aren't ones that a human would make very often, that doesn't mean that the computer isn't on par with humans in terms of overall death rate. But the computer still looks bad on the mistakes it makes.
dllthomas 9y ago
> human drivers all think they are far above average. And that’s the real problem. This is often a joke, and there's some truth to it - people are often overconfident. But there certainly are individuals who think they are below average. It might be rare and still a market.