8 ms·

Are you saying that even if AI can't react as well as humans, the roads would potentially be safer with more AI drivers because of the cumulative effect of all

Are you saying that even if AI can't react as well as humans, the roads would potentially be safer with more AI drivers because of the cumulative effect of all the little safety rules they follow that human drivers do not?

bsder 8y ago
Yes. Computers won't get distracted. Computers won't accidentally mix up medications and get foggy. Computers won't get tired. Computers won't drive drunk. I can create a self-driving car better than 50% of Southern Californians right now: "<beep> High humidity detected. I'm sorry, I can't let you drive today, Dave. <beep>" People suck at driving in new places--take a plane flight to a new city, rent a car, and have a passenger record how many illegal things you do--you probably won't make it out of the airport before the first infraction. People are good at driving in the familiar because they memorize it. A new stop sign at a previously uncontrolled intersection causes chaos for a while. Computers will also memorize the local environment at some point. Remember how bad Google Maps was when they started? This will be the same.
- Normal_gaussian 8y ago
  It is a shame that sales pressures are stopping us forcing "AI" cars from being branded in an obvious way (bright orange and pale blue stripes?) - this would allow human drivers to treat the vehicle as a non-human, removing a lot of the dangers it would cause to lawbreakers who follow too closely. Of course `AI hybrid` vehicles would still behave unpredictably unless they had some way to signal whether the human or the `AI` was in control of the vehicle.
- dbt00 8y ago
  You're comparing what humans do to what software could possibly do, which is a category error. Software doesn't recognize color coded warning signs. Software doesn't trust it's stationary object recognition at high speeds. Software doesn't distinguish between high speeds on limited access highways and high speeds on pedestrian accessible roads. Software has a higher crash and fatality rate per mile driven than humans, right now, despite driving in statistically safer cars. Yes there are good reasons to be hopeful software can do better at those things eventually, but it's obvious now that it's not ready (or Tesla wouldn't have to trash-talk a dead man for not maintaining high enough torque on the steering wheel to inform the car he was steering, because he wouldn't be dead and they wouldn't have to require passive hands on the wheel).
  - slg 8y ago
    >Software has a higher crash and fatality rate per mile driven than humans, right now, despite driving in statistically safer cars. Do you have a source for that claim because everything I have seen has been inconclusive so far?
    - ben_w 8y ago
      From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatal... 3rd Tesla autopilot fatality happened at 210,000,000 km, giving a fatality rate of 9.2—14.3 per billion km of autopilot depending on if you take the average just before or just after the third death. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic... USA has an average of 7.1 fatalities per billion vehicle-km. I’m assuming most of the Tesla kilometres were in the USA. I don’t know if that is a reasonable assumption.
      - slg 8y ago
        >3rd Tesla autopilot fatality happened at 210,000,000 km That 210 million km (130 million miles) number is just flat out wrong for that time period. That number originally comes from Tesla's public statements after the first fatality in the US. That was close to 2 years before that 3rd fatality happened. Tesla should be well over 1.5 billion km by now which would bring the fatality rate to down below 2 per billion km. [1] - https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss
        dbt00 8y ago
        Tesla doesn't publish current mileage or crash incident reports under autopilot; given their willingness to lie about Wei Huang's conduct before his crash I'd be surprised if their statistics actually held up as beneficial. The numbers I recall seeing were specific to Uber, who were attempting to operate a fully autonomous vehicle (Tesla doesn't claim to, except when Elon does press). In any event, if you're going to compare injury and crash rates, you should compare Tesla to other luxury cars with FCW+AEB. Those systems alone create 40% fewer crashes in at least one analysis[1] but don't come with the risk issues of automated lane changes and steering control that create driver inattention. That improvement is over and above passive safety improvements in luxury cars. 1. https://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/IIHS-CicchinoEffectivenessOfCWS-Jan2016.pdf https://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/I...
- neolefty 8y ago
  People also have trouble with changes to otherwise familiar places. I watched an elderly driver last week get very discombobulated by a local detour, at low speed. And I can see that happening to me in a few decades too.
niftich 8y ago
My prediction is that if self-driving cars commingle with human-driven cars on the same roadway, and are common enough to show up during your commute, road safety will improve slightly in aggregate, but the immediate environs of traffic surrounding a self-driving car will be less safe. There will be drivers annoyed at the car whose behavior approximates a tentative, wary driver: strictly adhering to the speed limit, leaving ample space in front, avoiding lane changes, braking early, and occasionally pumping the brakes for no discernible reason. These self-driving cars will create a traffic bubble around them, making it less safe for everyone else, including the aggressive drivers who will cut it off or overtake it at a high rate of speed, and the average motorists who are just trying to align their driving to the emergent conditions of traffic, and are caught between conflicting pressures and unsafe adjacency to different speeds.
- skybrian 8y ago
  It's unclear to me why human drivers should be considered unable to adapt to more "tentative, wary" drivers on the roads. After all, humans vary quite a bit in how they drive. There are plenty of cautious drivers already out there.
  - tempestn 8y ago
    They do adapt; it's just slightly less safe than being among a set of vehicles behaving more similarly. Same thing with a particularly tentative human driver. (Or a particularly aggressive one, of course.)
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Humans are pretty good drivers if you don't count the ones who are drunk, looking at a phone or otherwise impaired. If you a bunch of AI cars into the mix safety will decrease unless you toss them in in a way that results in them displacing the more risky drivers.

bsder 8y ago

Yes. Computers won't get distracted. Computers won't accidentally mix up medications and get foggy. Computers won't get tired. Computers won't drive drunk. I can create a self-driving car better than 50% of Southern Californians right now: "<beep> High humidity detected. I'm sorry, I can't let you drive today, Dave. <beep>" People suck at driving in new places--take a plane flight to a new city, rent a car, and have a passenger record how many illegal things you do--you probably won't make it out of the airport before the first infraction. People are good at driving in the familiar because they memorize it. A new stop sign at a previously uncontrolled intersection causes chaos for a while. Computers will also memorize the local environment at some point. Remember how bad Google Maps was when they started? This will be the same.

Normal_gaussian 8y ago
It is a shame that sales pressures are stopping us forcing "AI" cars from being branded in an obvious way (bright orange and pale blue stripes?) - this would allow human drivers to treat the vehicle as a non-human, removing a lot of the dangers it would cause to lawbreakers who follow too closely. Of course `AI hybrid` vehicles would still behave unpredictably unless they had some way to signal whether the human or the `AI` was in control of the vehicle.
dbt00 8y ago
You're comparing what humans do to what software could possibly do, which is a category error. Software doesn't recognize color coded warning signs. Software doesn't trust it's stationary object recognition at high speeds. Software doesn't distinguish between high speeds on limited access highways and high speeds on pedestrian accessible roads. Software has a higher crash and fatality rate per mile driven than humans, right now, despite driving in statistically safer cars. Yes there are good reasons to be hopeful software can do better at those things eventually, but it's obvious now that it's not ready (or Tesla wouldn't have to trash-talk a dead man for not maintaining high enough torque on the steering wheel to inform the car he was steering, because he wouldn't be dead and they wouldn't have to require passive hands on the wheel).
- slg 8y ago
  >Software has a higher crash and fatality rate per mile driven than humans, right now, despite driving in statistically safer cars. Do you have a source for that claim because everything I have seen has been inconclusive so far?
  - ben_w 8y ago
    From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatal... 3rd Tesla autopilot fatality happened at 210,000,000 km, giving a fatality rate of 9.2—14.3 per billion km of autopilot depending on if you take the average just before or just after the third death. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic... USA has an average of 7.1 fatalities per billion vehicle-km. I’m assuming most of the Tesla kilometres were in the USA. I don’t know if that is a reasonable assumption.
    - slg 8y ago
      >3rd Tesla autopilot fatality happened at 210,000,000 km That 210 million km (130 million miles) number is just flat out wrong for that time period. That number originally comes from Tesla's public statements after the first fatality in the US. That was close to 2 years before that 3rd fatality happened. Tesla should be well over 1.5 billion km by now which would bring the fatality rate to down below 2 per billion km. [1] - https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss
      - dbt00 8y ago
        Tesla doesn't publish current mileage or crash incident reports under autopilot; given their willingness to lie about Wei Huang's conduct before his crash I'd be surprised if their statistics actually held up as beneficial. The numbers I recall seeing were specific to Uber, who were attempting to operate a fully autonomous vehicle (Tesla doesn't claim to, except when Elon does press). In any event, if you're going to compare injury and crash rates, you should compare Tesla to other luxury cars with FCW+AEB. Those systems alone create 40% fewer crashes in at least one analysis[1] but don't come with the risk issues of automated lane changes and steering control that create driver inattention. That improvement is over and above passive safety improvements in luxury cars. 1. https://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/IIHS-CicchinoEffectivenessOfCWS-Jan2016.pdf https://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/I...
neolefty 8y ago
People also have trouble with changes to otherwise familiar places. I watched an elderly driver last week get very discombobulated by a local detour, at low speed. And I can see that happening to me in a few decades too.

niftich 8y ago

My prediction is that if self-driving cars commingle with human-driven cars on the same roadway, and are common enough to show up during your commute, road safety will improve slightly in aggregate, but the immediate environs of traffic surrounding a self-driving car will be less safe. There will be drivers annoyed at the car whose behavior approximates a tentative, wary driver: strictly adhering to the speed limit, leaving ample space in front, avoiding lane changes, braking early, and occasionally pumping the brakes for no discernible reason. These self-driving cars will create a traffic bubble around them, making it less safe for everyone else, including the aggressive drivers who will cut it off or overtake it at a high rate of speed, and the average motorists who are just trying to align their driving to the emergent conditions of traffic, and are caught between conflicting pressures and unsafe adjacency to different speeds.

skybrian 8y ago
It's unclear to me why human drivers should be considered unable to adapt to more "tentative, wary" drivers on the roads. After all, humans vary quite a bit in how they drive. There are plenty of cautious drivers already out there.
- tempestn 8y ago
  They do adapt; it's just slightly less safe than being among a set of vehicles behaving more similarly. Same thing with a particularly tentative human driver. (Or a particularly aggressive one, of course.)
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Humans are pretty good drivers if you don't count the ones who are drunk, looking at a phone or otherwise impaired. If you a bunch of AI cars into the mix safety will decrease unless you toss them in in a way that results in them displacing the more risky drivers.