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I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousa

I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. But I think you're right. I think the "best" way to move forward until we have perfected the technology is not something that drives for you, but something that will completely take over the millisecond the car detects that something terrible is about to happen. People will be engaged because they have to be engaged, to drive the car. The machine can still gather all the data and ship it off to HQ to improve itself (and compare its own decisions to those of the human driver, which IMO is infinitely more valuable). But if there's one thing the average person is terrible at, it's reacting quickly to terrible situations. You're absolutely right that people can't be trusted to remain actively engaged when something else is doing the driving. Great example with the cruise control, too.

rightbyte 9y ago
Thats kinda Volvo Cars approuch, word by word, as one of their RnD engineers explained it to me.
- southern_cross 9y ago
  IIRC, it was also Volvo who a few years back said that they would gladly take on any liability issues for their self-driving cars. Only to backtrack on that a short while later after having learned what liability laws in the U.S. actually look like, saying that they wouldn't take on such liability until the laws are changed to be more in their favor. So there's that ...
almost_usual 9y ago
> I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. I generally agree with this philosophy but this is very optimistic, at least in the United States. This is a country where we can't even ban assault rifles let alone people from driving their own vehicles. You're going to see people drive their own vehicles for a very long time even if self driving technology is perfected.
- lorenzorhoades 9y ago
  I think there is a key point that will result in the freedom of being able to drive being stripped long before assault rifles. Imagine if i create a private road from SF to LA and say that only self driving cars can drive on it. The vehicles on this road are all inter-connected, allowing them to travel at speeds in excess of 150+ MPH, and since the road that i've created is completely flat it still allows it to be a smooth ride. But if i allow cars who's actions can't be predicted (Car driven by a human), it then becomes impossible to safely drive at these speeds. So me, and the road owner, bans cars driven by people on my private toll road. As this becomes more prelevent, i will no longer have the want or need to drive my own car because then it takes me 6 Hours to get to LA instead of 2. All the while there no reason for me to get rid of my assault rifle, because i really enjoy firing it out the window of my self-driving car at 150MPH on the way to LA.
  - CPLX 9y ago
    The thing you're describing is called a train.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      Are you going to having a train running every few minutes to really make the delays comparable? And you need a fleet of rental cars so that people can actually get to their destination. What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        I'm pretty sure that the rail is more expensive... until you start paying for the gas for all the cars. Railroads kill highways on energy efficiency. If the cars are electric, I'm less sure.
        nightski 9y ago
        Not to mention cars going 150 MPH. I can't imagine the fuel expenditure for that kind of commute. Efficiency starts dropping dramatically at 55+.
perennate 9y ago
> because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. Whose lives are we sacrificing? In the case of the Uber crash in Tempe and this Tesla crash in California, the people who died did not volunteer to risk their lives to advance research in autonomous vehicles. I highly respect individuals who choose to risk their lives to better the world or make progress, like doctors fighting disease in Africa and astronauts going to space, but at the same time, I think this must always be a choice. Otherwise we could justify forcing prisoners to try new drugs as the first stage of clinical trials. Or worse things. Which is why there are extensive vetting before approval for clinical trials is given. I do think that, once the safety of autonomous vehicles have been proven on a number of testbeds, but before they are ready for deployment, it is justifiable to drive them on public roads. Maybe without safety drivers. But until then, careful consideration should be given to their testing. Uber should not have been able to run autonomous vehicles with safety drivers where the safety driver could be allowed to look away from the road for several seconds while the car was moving at >30mph. The car should automatically shutoff if it is not clear whether the safety driver is paying attention. And there should be legislation that bans any company that fails to implement basic safeguards like this from testing again for at least a decade, with severe fines. Probably speeds should also be limited to ~30mph for the first few years of testing while the technology is still so immature, as it is today. Similarly, Tesla should not be allowed to deploy their Autopilot software to consumers before they conduct studies to show that it is reasonably safe. Repeated accidents have shown that Level 1 and Level 2 autonomous vehicles, where the car drives autonomously but the driver must be ready to intervene, is a failed model unless the car actively monitors that the driver is paying attention. Overall I think justifying the current state of things by saying that people must be sacrificed for this technology to work is ridiculous. Basic safeguards are not being used, and if we require them, maybe autonomous vehicles will take a few years longer to reach deployment, but that thousands of lives could become tens. Edit: I read in another comment that the Tesla car at least "alarms at you when you take your hands off the wheel". In that case I think what Tesla is doing is much more reasonable. (Not Uber, though.) Although I still feel like it is going to be hard to react to dangerous situations when the system operates correctly almost all the time (even if you are paying attention and have your hands on the wheel). But I'm not sure what the correct policy should be here, because I don't fully understand why people use this in the first place (since it sounds like Autopilot doesn't save you any work).
drharby 9y ago
The big issue is whether one is volunyeering to take the risk or enrolling someone yo assume yhe risk
osrec 9y ago
I disagree with your initial sentiment. In my opinion, we can have self driving cars without a large human toll. I just think we need to stop trying to merge self driving cars into a road system designed for human operators. Moreover, we should not be "beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators. Accidents will happen, as ML models can and do go unstable from time to time. Instead, we should look to update our roads and infrastructure to be better suited to automated cars. Till then, I hope those martyred in the name of self driving technology are not near and dear to you (even if you'd feel it's worth it).
- tedivm 9y ago
  To me beta testing should be a long period of time where the computer is running while humans are driving, with deviations between what the computer would do if it had control versus what the human actually does being recorded for future training. The value add is that the computer can still be used to alert to dangerous conditions, or potentially even overriding in certain circumstances (applying break when lidar sees an obstacle at night when the human driver didn't see it). The problem is that Uber needs self driving cars in order to make money, and Tesla firmly believes that their system is safer than human drivers by themselves (even if a few people who wouldn't have otherwise died do, others who might have died won't and they believe those numbers make it worth it).
  - Splines 9y ago
    It's surprising that this isn't the standard right now. I'm certain the people at Tesla/Uber/Waymo have considered this - I'm curious why this approach isn't more common.
    - turtlebits 9y ago
      I'm sure it is the standard during testing. I doubt you can do this for the general population.
    - kolinko 9y ago
      It was happening. Many companies, Tesla including, gathered a lot of data for training the system. The problem is that you cna only learn so much without actual practice.
Fins 9y ago
I am not really sure if development of SDVs is really that important, but even if it were, your proposal would only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk racing your Teslas on Tesla's private proving grounds. Somewhere in the Kalahari desert seems to be an acceptable location. The moment people "making a sacrifice" are unsuspecting customers, and eventually innocent bystanders you are veering very much into Dr. Mengele's territory. Actually, one thing that I was curious about regarding this incident -- they say that authorities had to wait for a team of Tesla's engineers to show up to clean up burning mess of batteries. Luckily for everyone else trying to get somewhere on 101 that day, Tesla's HQ isn't too far away. What if next time one drives into a barrier it happens in a middle of Wyoming? Will the road stay closed until Tesla's engineers can hitch a ride on one of Musk's Falcons?
- kbutler 9y ago
  "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. " And $879B in USA per year.
  - Fins 9y ago
    So we should kill even more people, who had never signed up to be guinea pigs, so that maybe there will be a self-driving car at some point? Which most of those dying in those crashes will not be able to afford anytime soon anyway...
    - kbutler 9y ago
      No, but every year we delay replacing human drivers with something much safer, we incur huge distributed costs. It is thus very important.
      - Fins 9y ago
        Thnat's assuming that the replacement actually is safer, which in case of the Auto-Pilot is not the case now, and not necessarily the case ever. There is a reason Waymo isn't unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public.
hyperbole 9y ago
No one dies so someone 10 years from now can watch a full episode of the family guy unimpeded for the duration of their commute. The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel - that's bs.
- pstuart 9y ago
  Plenty of people die right now because they just got a text or they had no other way home from the bar, etc. The human toll is absolutely relevant to the conversation: this is about people dying now and in the future. It seems cruel to discuss it in a "I'll sacrifice X to save Y" later, but it can reasonably be reduced to that. I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and deaths.
  - hyperbole 9y ago
    It's a deceptive to assume autopilot saves lives when it too has taken them. The number of people with access to auto pilot is far fewer to statistically determine how many more center divider deaths we might have if everyone were it's passenger. Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No. I hope we eventually save lives as in net improvement in current death totals by using these technologies but the risks are not well communicated, the marketing is entirely out of sync with the risks and the "martyrs" we create thus to me look like victims.
    - buvanshak 9y ago
      > Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No. I think beliefs such as these is fueled by the extremely naive implication that each death will cause the learning algorithm to "improve itself" so every self driving thing out there is safer owing to that death..
mozumder 9y ago
People love their cars too much. Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere. Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politicians that make that decision? This is the correct solution, since the AI solution of self-driving cars isn't going to happen. Their high fatality rates are going to remain high.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Maybe, but unless you can change the laws of nature, you can't build a mass transit system that can serve everyone full-time with reasonable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and that's just meeting the minimum requirement of getting from A to B, without getting into all the other downsides of public vs. private transportation in terms of health, privacy, security, etc.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    OK. Anything else you want to make up? Let's see what that imagination can craft.
    - Silhouette 9y ago
      There's no need to make anything up. Mass transit systems are relatively efficient if and only if they are used on routes popular enough to replace enough private vehicles to offset their greater size and operating costs (both physical and financial). That usually means big cities, or major routes in smaller cities at busier times. Achieving 24/7 mass transit, available with reasonable frequency for journeys over both short and long distances, would certainly require everyone to live in big cities with very high population densities. Here in the UK, we only have a handful of cities with populations of over one million today. That is the sort of scale you're talking about for that sort of transportation system to be at all viable, although an order of magnitude larger would be more practical. All of those cities have long histories and relatively inefficient layouts, which would make it quite difficult to scale them up dramatically without causing other fundamental problems with infrastructure and logistics. So, in order to solve the problem of providing viable mass transit for everyone to replace their personal vehicles, you would first need to build, starting from scratch or at least from much smaller urban areas, perhaps 20-30 new big cities to house a few tens of millions of people. You would then need all of those people to move to those new cities. You'd be destroying all of their former communities in the process, of course, and for about 10,000,000 of them, they'd be giving up their entire rural way of life. Also, since no-one could live in rural areas any more, your farming had better be 100% automated, along with any other infrastructure or emergency facilities you need to support your mass transit away from the big cities. The UK is currently in the middle of a housing crisis, with an acute lack of supply caused by decades of under-investment and failure to build anywhere close to enough new homes. Today, we're lucky if we build 200,000 per year, while the typical demand is for at least 300,000, which means the problem is getting worse every year. The difference between home-owners and those who are renting or otherwise living in supported accommodation is one of the defining inequalities of our generation, with all the tensions and social problems that follow. But sure, we could get everyone off private transportation and onto mass transit. All we'd have to do is uproot about 3/4 of our population, destroy their communities and in many cases their whole way of life, build new houses at least an order of magnitude faster than we have managed for the last several decades, achieve total automation in our out-of-city farming and other infrastructure, replace infrastructure for an entire nation that has been centuries in development... and then build all these wonderful new mass transit systems, which would still almost inevitably be worse than private transportation in several fundamental ways.
skywhopper 9y ago
While I agree with your conclusion, the opening line strikes me as silly. Why is it "so important" to have self-driving cars? These cars that can't detect stationary objects directly in front of them are nowhere close to the self-driving pipe dream that's been around for a century. Maybe by 2118 we'll be making more progress.
- supernovae 9y ago
  It won't take that long. Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident. Now we have cars with lane assist, smart breaking, auto pilot features and that's only in the past 5-10 years. Of all the places where technology can save lives, its definitely in vehicles/transportation.
  - buvanshak 9y ago
    > Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident. How many optical illusions do you usually see in the roads while driving, that can result in an accident? I am not even talking about the "people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them" part. I mean, how can you be a human being and say this? If we were "terrible at detecting objects directly in front of us", we would have been predated out of existence a long time ago..
    - TipVFL 9y ago
      Humans can only look in one direction, and only from inside the car with their view obstructed, and they're only paying attention sometimes. Check out this article, it is easy to never see a bike you're on a collision course with. https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-this-type-of-road-junction-will-keep-killing-cyclists/ https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...
      - 9y ago
dbasedweeb 9y ago
If you’re willing to die for this, then by all means go ahead and sign up to be a dummy on a test track. If you know other people who feel the same way, sign up as a group. If you’re just talking about letting other people die so that someday, maybe we’ll have fully automated cars, that’s monstrous, especially when they’re not volunteers and don’t get to opt out! A laudable goal doesn’t give anyone the right to kill people by taking unnecessary risks. The reason that Tesla and Uber do what they do the way they do, instead of a more conservative approach is an attempt to profit, not save lives. If you don’t have to spend lives to make progress, but choose to do so for economic experience, there’s s word for that: evil.
intended 9y ago
Its not going to happen. Peopl I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it till eventually the tide turns on HN and elsewhere. You will not have full autonomy unless you control the road itself. At which point you are better off just making it mass transit.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  You could also, presumably, have supervision - not control the road, but control all road users. But that's equally impractical I think.
AlexandrB 9y ago
> I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. This is the definition of a false dichotomy and it implicitly puts the onus on early adopters to risk their lives (!) in order to achieve full autonomy. Why not put the onus on the car manufacturer to invest sufficient capital to make their cars safe!? To rephrase what you said with this perspective: > ...developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of billions of investor dollars in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. This seems strictly better than the formulation you provided. How nuts is it that the assumption here is that people will have to die for this technology to be perfected. Why not pour 10x or 100x the current level of investment and build entire mock towns to test these cars in - with trained drivers emulating traffic scenarios? Why put profits ahead of people?
- fapjacks 9y ago
  This reply is a classic straw man (and one of the main reasons I left Facebook behind). You are making an assumption here that's wrong and I hate that I have to speak to what you've said here because you are reading words that I didn't type. I personally would not choose to put profits ahead of people. But I didn't say anything about profit. I deliberately left profit and money completely out of my post for a reason. You also seem to be suggesting that throwing money at the problem is going to magically make it perfectly safe. You are looking for guarantees and I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are no guarantees in life. "Screws fall out all the time". People are going to die in the process of developing self-driving automobile technology. People are going to die in situations that have nothing to do with self-driving automobile technology. Deaths are inevitable and I am saying that it is worth a perceived significant loss of human life to close the gap using technology so that the number of people dying on the roads every year approaches zero.
imtringued 9y ago
In that case tesla's autopilot is a red herring. It's not a fully autonomous system. If you're willing to sacrifice human lives then please sacrifice them on systems that actually have a chance of working. Tesla's autopilot isn't one of them, it's most likely never going to reduce the fatality rate below the skill of a sober human because it's just a simple lane keeping and cruise control assistant.

rightbyte 9y ago

Thats kinda Volvo Cars approuch, word by word, as one of their RnD engineers explained it to me.

southern_cross 9y ago
IIRC, it was also Volvo who a few years back said that they would gladly take on any liability issues for their self-driving cars. Only to backtrack on that a short while later after having learned what liability laws in the U.S. actually look like, saying that they wouldn't take on such liability until the laws are changed to be more in their favor. So there's that ...

almost_usual 9y ago

lorenzorhoades 9y ago
I think there is a key point that will result in the freedom of being able to drive being stripped long before assault rifles. Imagine if i create a private road from SF to LA and say that only self driving cars can drive on it. The vehicles on this road are all inter-connected, allowing them to travel at speeds in excess of 150+ MPH, and since the road that i've created is completely flat it still allows it to be a smooth ride. But if i allow cars who's actions can't be predicted (Car driven by a human), it then becomes impossible to safely drive at these speeds. So me, and the road owner, bans cars driven by people on my private toll road. As this becomes more prelevent, i will no longer have the want or need to drive my own car because then it takes me 6 Hours to get to LA instead of 2. All the while there no reason for me to get rid of my assault rifle, because i really enjoy firing it out the window of my self-driving car at 150MPH on the way to LA.
- CPLX 9y ago
  The thing you're describing is called a train.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Are you going to having a train running every few minutes to really make the delays comparable? And you need a fleet of rental cars so that people can actually get to their destination. What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure that the rail is more expensive... until you start paying for the gas for all the cars. Railroads kill highways on energy efficiency. If the cars are electric, I'm less sure.
      - nightski 9y ago
        Not to mention cars going 150 MPH. I can't imagine the fuel expenditure for that kind of commute. Efficiency starts dropping dramatically at 55+.

perennate 9y ago

> because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. Whose lives are we sacrificing? In the case of the Uber crash in Tempe and this Tesla crash in California, the people who died did not volunteer to risk their lives to advance research in autonomous vehicles. I highly respect individuals who choose to risk their lives to better the world or make progress, like doctors fighting disease in Africa and astronauts going to space, but at the same time, I think this must always be a choice. Otherwise we could justify forcing prisoners to try new drugs as the first stage of clinical trials. Or worse things. Which is why there are extensive vetting before approval for clinical trials is given. I do think that, once the safety of autonomous vehicles have been proven on a number of testbeds, but before they are ready for deployment, it is justifiable to drive them on public roads. Maybe without safety drivers. But until then, careful consideration should be given to their testing. Uber should not have been able to run autonomous vehicles with safety drivers where the safety driver could be allowed to look away from the road for several seconds while the car was moving at >30mph. The car should automatically shutoff if it is not clear whether the safety driver is paying attention. And there should be legislation that bans any company that fails to implement basic safeguards like this from testing again for at least a decade, with severe fines. Probably speeds should also be limited to ~30mph for the first few years of testing while the technology is still so immature, as it is today. Similarly, Tesla should not be allowed to deploy their Autopilot software to consumers before they conduct studies to show that it is reasonably safe. Repeated accidents have shown that Level 1 and Level 2 autonomous vehicles, where the car drives autonomously but the driver must be ready to intervene, is a failed model unless the car actively monitors that the driver is paying attention. Overall I think justifying the current state of things by saying that people must be sacrificed for this technology to work is ridiculous. Basic safeguards are not being used, and if we require them, maybe autonomous vehicles will take a few years longer to reach deployment, but that thousands of lives could become tens. Edit: I read in another comment that the Tesla car at least "alarms at you when you take your hands off the wheel". In that case I think what Tesla is doing is much more reasonable. (Not Uber, though.) Although I still feel like it is going to be hard to react to dangerous situations when the system operates correctly almost all the time (even if you are paying attention and have your hands on the wheel). But I'm not sure what the correct policy should be here, because I don't fully understand why people use this in the first place (since it sounds like Autopilot doesn't save you any work).

drharby 9y ago

The big issue is whether one is volunyeering to take the risk or enrolling someone yo assume yhe risk

osrec 9y ago

I disagree with your initial sentiment. In my opinion, we can have self driving cars without a large human toll. I just think we need to stop trying to merge self driving cars into a road system designed for human operators. Moreover, we should not be "beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators. Accidents will happen, as ML models can and do go unstable from time to time. Instead, we should look to update our roads and infrastructure to be better suited to automated cars. Till then, I hope those martyred in the name of self driving technology are not near and dear to you (even if you'd feel it's worth it).

tedivm 9y ago
To me beta testing should be a long period of time where the computer is running while humans are driving, with deviations between what the computer would do if it had control versus what the human actually does being recorded for future training. The value add is that the computer can still be used to alert to dangerous conditions, or potentially even overriding in certain circumstances (applying break when lidar sees an obstacle at night when the human driver didn't see it). The problem is that Uber needs self driving cars in order to make money, and Tesla firmly believes that their system is safer than human drivers by themselves (even if a few people who wouldn't have otherwise died do, others who might have died won't and they believe those numbers make it worth it).
- Splines 9y ago
  It's surprising that this isn't the standard right now. I'm certain the people at Tesla/Uber/Waymo have considered this - I'm curious why this approach isn't more common.
  - turtlebits 9y ago
    I'm sure it is the standard during testing. I doubt you can do this for the general population.
  - kolinko 9y ago
    It was happening. Many companies, Tesla including, gathered a lot of data for training the system. The problem is that you cna only learn so much without actual practice.

Fins 9y ago

I am not really sure if development of SDVs is really that important, but even if it were, your proposal would only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk racing your Teslas on Tesla's private proving grounds. Somewhere in the Kalahari desert seems to be an acceptable location. The moment people "making a sacrifice" are unsuspecting customers, and eventually innocent bystanders you are veering very much into Dr. Mengele's territory. Actually, one thing that I was curious about regarding this incident -- they say that authorities had to wait for a team of Tesla's engineers to show up to clean up burning mess of batteries. Luckily for everyone else trying to get somewhere on 101 that day, Tesla's HQ isn't too far away. What if next time one drives into a barrier it happens in a middle of Wyoming? Will the road stay closed until Tesla's engineers can hitch a ride on one of Musk's Falcons?

kbutler 9y ago
"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. " And $879B in USA per year.
- Fins 9y ago
  So we should kill even more people, who had never signed up to be guinea pigs, so that maybe there will be a self-driving car at some point? Which most of those dying in those crashes will not be able to afford anytime soon anyway...
  - kbutler 9y ago
    No, but every year we delay replacing human drivers with something much safer, we incur huge distributed costs. It is thus very important.
    - Fins 9y ago
      Thnat's assuming that the replacement actually is safer, which in case of the Auto-Pilot is not the case now, and not necessarily the case ever. There is a reason Waymo isn't unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public.

hyperbole 9y ago

No one dies so someone 10 years from now can watch a full episode of the family guy unimpeded for the duration of their commute. The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel - that's bs.

pstuart 9y ago
Plenty of people die right now because they just got a text or they had no other way home from the bar, etc. The human toll is absolutely relevant to the conversation: this is about people dying now and in the future. It seems cruel to discuss it in a "I'll sacrifice X to save Y" later, but it can reasonably be reduced to that. I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and deaths.
- hyperbole 9y ago
  It's a deceptive to assume autopilot saves lives when it too has taken them. The number of people with access to auto pilot is far fewer to statistically determine how many more center divider deaths we might have if everyone were it's passenger. Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No. I hope we eventually save lives as in net improvement in current death totals by using these technologies but the risks are not well communicated, the marketing is entirely out of sync with the risks and the "martyrs" we create thus to me look like victims.
  - buvanshak 9y ago
    > Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No. I think beliefs such as these is fueled by the extremely naive implication that each death will cause the learning algorithm to "improve itself" so every self driving thing out there is safer owing to that death..

mozumder 9y ago

People love their cars too much. Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere. Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politicians that make that decision? This is the correct solution, since the AI solution of self-driving cars isn't going to happen. Their high fatality rates are going to remain high.

Silhouette 9y ago
Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Maybe, but unless you can change the laws of nature, you can't build a mass transit system that can serve everyone full-time with reasonable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and that's just meeting the minimum requirement of getting from A to B, without getting into all the other downsides of public vs. private transportation in terms of health, privacy, security, etc.
- mozumder 9y ago
  OK. Anything else you want to make up? Let's see what that imagination can craft.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    There's no need to make anything up. Mass transit systems are relatively efficient if and only if they are used on routes popular enough to replace enough private vehicles to offset their greater size and operating costs (both physical and financial). That usually means big cities, or major routes in smaller cities at busier times. Achieving 24/7 mass transit, available with reasonable frequency for journeys over both short and long distances, would certainly require everyone to live in big cities with very high population densities. Here in the UK, we only have a handful of cities with populations of over one million today. That is the sort of scale you're talking about for that sort of transportation system to be at all viable, although an order of magnitude larger would be more practical. All of those cities have long histories and relatively inefficient layouts, which would make it quite difficult to scale them up dramatically without causing other fundamental problems with infrastructure and logistics. So, in order to solve the problem of providing viable mass transit for everyone to replace their personal vehicles, you would first need to build, starting from scratch or at least from much smaller urban areas, perhaps 20-30 new big cities to house a few tens of millions of people. You would then need all of those people to move to those new cities. You'd be destroying all of their former communities in the process, of course, and for about 10,000,000 of them, they'd be giving up their entire rural way of life. Also, since no-one could live in rural areas any more, your farming had better be 100% automated, along with any other infrastructure or emergency facilities you need to support your mass transit away from the big cities. The UK is currently in the middle of a housing crisis, with an acute lack of supply caused by decades of under-investment and failure to build anywhere close to enough new homes. Today, we're lucky if we build 200,000 per year, while the typical demand is for at least 300,000, which means the problem is getting worse every year. The difference between home-owners and those who are renting or otherwise living in supported accommodation is one of the defining inequalities of our generation, with all the tensions and social problems that follow. But sure, we could get everyone off private transportation and onto mass transit. All we'd have to do is uproot about 3/4 of our population, destroy their communities and in many cases their whole way of life, build new houses at least an order of magnitude faster than we have managed for the last several decades, achieve total automation in our out-of-city farming and other infrastructure, replace infrastructure for an entire nation that has been centuries in development... and then build all these wonderful new mass transit systems, which would still almost inevitably be worse than private transportation in several fundamental ways.

skywhopper 9y ago

While I agree with your conclusion, the opening line strikes me as silly. Why is it "so important" to have self-driving cars? These cars that can't detect stationary objects directly in front of them are nowhere close to the self-driving pipe dream that's been around for a century. Maybe by 2118 we'll be making more progress.

supernovae 9y ago
It won't take that long. Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident. Now we have cars with lane assist, smart breaking, auto pilot features and that's only in the past 5-10 years. Of all the places where technology can save lives, its definitely in vehicles/transportation.
- buvanshak 9y ago
  > Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident. How many optical illusions do you usually see in the roads while driving, that can result in an accident? I am not even talking about the "people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them" part. I mean, how can you be a human being and say this? If we were "terrible at detecting objects directly in front of us", we would have been predated out of existence a long time ago..
  - TipVFL 9y ago
    Humans can only look in one direction, and only from inside the car with their view obstructed, and they're only paying attention sometimes. Check out this article, it is easy to never see a bike you're on a collision course with. https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-this-type-of-road-junction-will-keep-killing-cyclists/ https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...
    - 9y ago

dbasedweeb 9y ago

If you’re willing to die for this, then by all means go ahead and sign up to be a dummy on a test track. If you know other people who feel the same way, sign up as a group. If you’re just talking about letting other people die so that someday, maybe we’ll have fully automated cars, that’s monstrous, especially when they’re not volunteers and don’t get to opt out! A laudable goal doesn’t give anyone the right to kill people by taking unnecessary risks. The reason that Tesla and Uber do what they do the way they do, instead of a more conservative approach is an attempt to profit, not save lives. If you don’t have to spend lives to make progress, but choose to do so for economic experience, there’s s word for that: evil.

intended 9y ago

Its not going to happen. Peopl I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it till eventually the tide turns on HN and elsewhere. You will not have full autonomy unless you control the road itself. At which point you are better off just making it mass transit.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
You could also, presumably, have supervision - not control the road, but control all road users. But that's equally impractical I think.

AlexandrB 9y ago

> I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. This is the definition of a false dichotomy and it implicitly puts the onus on early adopters to risk their lives (!) in order to achieve full autonomy. Why not put the onus on the car manufacturer to invest sufficient capital to make their cars safe!? To rephrase what you said with this perspective: > ...developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of billions of investor dollars in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. This seems strictly better than the formulation you provided. How nuts is it that the assumption here is that people will have to die for this technology to be perfected. Why not pour 10x or 100x the current level of investment and build entire mock towns to test these cars in - with trained drivers emulating traffic scenarios? Why put profits ahead of people?

fapjacks 9y ago
This reply is a classic straw man (and one of the main reasons I left Facebook behind). You are making an assumption here that's wrong and I hate that I have to speak to what you've said here because you are reading words that I didn't type. I personally would not choose to put profits ahead of people. But I didn't say anything about profit. I deliberately left profit and money completely out of my post for a reason. You also seem to be suggesting that throwing money at the problem is going to magically make it perfectly safe. You are looking for guarantees and I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are no guarantees in life. "Screws fall out all the time". People are going to die in the process of developing self-driving automobile technology. People are going to die in situations that have nothing to do with self-driving automobile technology. Deaths are inevitable and I am saying that it is worth a perceived significant loss of human life to close the gap using technology so that the number of people dying on the roads every year approaches zero.

imtringued 9y ago

In that case tesla's autopilot is a red herring. It's not a fully autonomous system. If you're willing to sacrifice human lives then please sacrifice them on systems that actually have a chance of working. Tesla's autopilot isn't one of them, it's most likely never going to reduce the fatality rate below the skill of a sober human because it's just a simple lane keeping and cruise control assistant.