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The replies to your comment seem only to focus on ways that this type of safer vehicle differs from the eventual commercial traffic use case. But who cares? It

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

The replies to your comment seem only to focus on ways that this type of safer vehicle differs from the eventual commercial traffic use case. But who cares? It still seems like it would be valuable to collect many millions of simulation hours and eventual live testing hours with far safer vehicle types first, at minimum just as a proof of concept and a prove-out of the appropriate testing and evaluation infrastructure (e.g. we’ll probably be a lot better at extending the audit process that evaluates autonomous golf carts into an audit process for common cars than we would be just jumping straight to auditing cars without ever having audited anything else). In fact, it seems irresponsible to not prove out the entire end to end ecosystem (from simulations to live testing to auditing to a commercially approved deployment in some limited scenario) using a much smaller scale application and vehicle type. I can understand the arms race motivation for cutting corners and jumping straight to the widest use cases on the part of corporations. But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
> But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way. Because these self driving cars aren't being developed to solve a hypothetical problem, they're being developed to solve the very real and current problem of cars killing 40,000 people in the US each year. If extra safety measures result in killing ten fewer people in testing, but delay the introduction of self-driving cars by a year or two, that could mean thousands of preventable deaths still occurred. Are the lives of those people definitely getting killed right now worth 100x less than the lives of those who might get killed with these tests? And this isn't baseless speculation. People are already obviously dying all the time, and improving these cars' software would be much harder without the kind of real-world data they're currently collecting.
- rimliu 8y ago
  It is baseless speculation. There is a high chance, that drivers most likeky to die in a car accident are less likely to use SDC. Also, estimating how safe sekf-driving car is you should take into account all the cases where human took over. Also there are many accidents in weather conditions where self driving car would not be able to drive at all.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    > There is a high chance, that drivers most likeky to die in a car accident are less likely to use SDC. Possible, but speculative. > Also, estimating how safe sekf-driving car is you should take into account all the cases where human took over. Sure, but on the other hand, the SDC's are continually improving as a group in a way that is not true for humans. This makes it harder to extrapolate into the future one way or the other. > Also there are many accidents in weather conditions where self driving car would not be able to drive at all. If you mean environments where humans also can't drive worth a damn, yes, probably true, although SDC's may yet prove better, since that's a technical problem rather than a social understanding one. But 90%+ of accidents involve human error, so even if you can't completely eliminate deaths, you can still radically reduce them.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > "Because these self driving cars aren't being developed to solve a hypothetical problem, they're being developed to solve the very real and current problem of cars killing 40,000 people in the US each year." Yes, exactly. This is the reason you would want the technology to be developed slowly and carefully, incubated in a safer scenario for a long time to ensure it can be effectively audited and deployed when it comes time to use it for the intended, safety-improving commercial traffic use cases. What you sounds sounds like good reason to more strongly favor a lengthy test and prove-out cycle on safer and more limited vehicle types, long before testing on commercial traffic vehicles. The rate of auto-related deaths happening today certainly would not be a reason to hastily rush the technology and jump directly to extensive testing on the final commercial traffic end use cases. Trying to "hurry up" and prevent those deaths could counter-intuitively lead to more deaths because the infrastructure and auditing processes were not proved out and slowly ramped up to real traffic scenarios.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    > Trying to "hurry up" and prevent those deaths could counter-intuitively lead to more deaths because the infrastructure and auditing processes were not proved out and slowly ramped up to real traffic scenarios. You assert this, but provide no reasoning. I mean, the status quo is "hurrying up", since there are no general standards companies are being held to, and yet only one company has killed anyone, and surprise surprise, it's the company with an extensive history of ethical problems, and they screwed up in a way that's really obvious and foreseeable. The status quo is a free for all, and yet we don't have much in the way of deaths and injuries from the millions of miles being driven by computers. It seems like companies are already themselves being fairly safe, so how many deaths would you actually be avoiding by implementing more stringent standards right now?
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      Huh? The status quo is a free for all? You are not describing the world we live in at all. In many industries, from food development to drug development to medical devices to clean energy tech to child car seats to film ratings we have nuanced and highly involved government oversight and regulations to try to ensure levels of safety, ethical and thorough clinical testing, ratings systems that map to outcomes, etc. etc. Yes, of course they are not always perfect, but that is beside the point entirely. The ubiquitous and widespread use of such regulations is a direct statement that companies cannot be trusted, have repeatedly proved through history to be untrustworthy regarding safety over and over across many industries, and that it's a civic need to have independent oversight. We can debate the amounts, regulatory capture, etc., but absolutely could not ever believe something like saying the status quo is just an industry free-for-all. In fact, cases where start-ups try to skirt these issues in under-regulated industries are extremely rare and do not at all represent any type of status quo in any sense. There is absolutely no sense in which that maps to the way things work. It is rare for a industry to come up with its own testing and evaluation strategy where societal outcomes aren't brought up as first-principle constraints on how the innovation has to proceed. > "It seems like companies are already themselves being fairly safe, so how many deaths would you actually be avoiding by implementing more stringent standards right now?" This is just so egregiously unrelated to reality that I do not have the time resources to even start to reply. My mouth is agape that someone would think this. > "You assert this, but provide no reasoning." I agree with this for self-driving cars. I am not an expert of self-driving cars, and feel it's perfectly fair for me to say that in virtually every other industry, regulations are needed to ensure corporations don't actively harm people, falsify results, rush to market, etc., and that it logically and obviously extends to self-driving cars without any need for some onerous debate. The idea that companies are just trustworthy to rush this stuff to commercial markets does not need to be taken seriously. It's just obviously not so. Beyond that, I completely agree I am not the expert on it, and would defer to e.g. the NTSB to decide how companies are behaving with regard to proper testing. The only part I would add is that as a citizen, my strong preference is for the testing to be gradual with a high emphasis on validation and a gradual proof of concept moving from simpler vehicles and situations to more complex ones. Regardless of what the raw machine learning capabilities are in terms of self-driving, this is needed to prove out the evaluation and auditing infrastructure as much as anything else -- essentially to prove that we have a framework for holding the companies accountable in the right ways.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

> But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way. Because these self driving cars aren't being developed to solve a hypothetical problem, they're being developed to solve the very real and current problem of cars killing 40,000 people in the US each year. If extra safety measures result in killing ten fewer people in testing, but delay the introduction of self-driving cars by a year or two, that could mean thousands of preventable deaths still occurred. Are the lives of those people definitely getting killed right now worth 100x less than the lives of those who might get killed with these tests? And this isn't baseless speculation. People are already obviously dying all the time, and improving these cars' software would be much harder without the kind of real-world data they're currently collecting.

rimliu 8y ago
It is baseless speculation. There is a high chance, that drivers most likeky to die in a car accident are less likely to use SDC. Also, estimating how safe sekf-driving car is you should take into account all the cases where human took over. Also there are many accidents in weather conditions where self driving car would not be able to drive at all.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > There is a high chance, that drivers most likeky to die in a car accident are less likely to use SDC. Possible, but speculative. > Also, estimating how safe sekf-driving car is you should take into account all the cases where human took over. Sure, but on the other hand, the SDC's are continually improving as a group in a way that is not true for humans. This makes it harder to extrapolate into the future one way or the other. > Also there are many accidents in weather conditions where self driving car would not be able to drive at all. If you mean environments where humans also can't drive worth a damn, yes, probably true, although SDC's may yet prove better, since that's a technical problem rather than a social understanding one. But 90%+ of accidents involve human error, so even if you can't completely eliminate deaths, you can still radically reduce them.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> "Because these self driving cars aren't being developed to solve a hypothetical problem, they're being developed to solve the very real and current problem of cars killing 40,000 people in the US each year." Yes, exactly. This is the reason you would want the technology to be developed slowly and carefully, incubated in a safer scenario for a long time to ensure it can be effectively audited and deployed when it comes time to use it for the intended, safety-improving commercial traffic use cases. What you sounds sounds like good reason to more strongly favor a lengthy test and prove-out cycle on safer and more limited vehicle types, long before testing on commercial traffic vehicles. The rate of auto-related deaths happening today certainly would not be a reason to hastily rush the technology and jump directly to extensive testing on the final commercial traffic end use cases. Trying to "hurry up" and prevent those deaths could counter-intuitively lead to more deaths because the infrastructure and auditing processes were not proved out and slowly ramped up to real traffic scenarios.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > Trying to "hurry up" and prevent those deaths could counter-intuitively lead to more deaths because the infrastructure and auditing processes were not proved out and slowly ramped up to real traffic scenarios. You assert this, but provide no reasoning. I mean, the status quo is "hurrying up", since there are no general standards companies are being held to, and yet only one company has killed anyone, and surprise surprise, it's the company with an extensive history of ethical problems, and they screwed up in a way that's really obvious and foreseeable. The status quo is a free for all, and yet we don't have much in the way of deaths and injuries from the millions of miles being driven by computers. It seems like companies are already themselves being fairly safe, so how many deaths would you actually be avoiding by implementing more stringent standards right now?
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Huh? The status quo is a free for all? You are not describing the world we live in at all. In many industries, from food development to drug development to medical devices to clean energy tech to child car seats to film ratings we have nuanced and highly involved government oversight and regulations to try to ensure levels of safety, ethical and thorough clinical testing, ratings systems that map to outcomes, etc. etc. Yes, of course they are not always perfect, but that is beside the point entirely. The ubiquitous and widespread use of such regulations is a direct statement that companies cannot be trusted, have repeatedly proved through history to be untrustworthy regarding safety over and over across many industries, and that it's a civic need to have independent oversight. We can debate the amounts, regulatory capture, etc., but absolutely could not ever believe something like saying the status quo is just an industry free-for-all. In fact, cases where start-ups try to skirt these issues in under-regulated industries are extremely rare and do not at all represent any type of status quo in any sense. There is absolutely no sense in which that maps to the way things work. It is rare for a industry to come up with its own testing and evaluation strategy where societal outcomes aren't brought up as first-principle constraints on how the innovation has to proceed. > "It seems like companies are already themselves being fairly safe, so how many deaths would you actually be avoiding by implementing more stringent standards right now?" This is just so egregiously unrelated to reality that I do not have the time resources to even start to reply. My mouth is agape that someone would think this. > "You assert this, but provide no reasoning." I agree with this for self-driving cars. I am not an expert of self-driving cars, and feel it's perfectly fair for me to say that in virtually every other industry, regulations are needed to ensure corporations don't actively harm people, falsify results, rush to market, etc., and that it logically and obviously extends to self-driving cars without any need for some onerous debate. The idea that companies are just trustworthy to rush this stuff to commercial markets does not need to be taken seriously. It's just obviously not so. Beyond that, I completely agree I am not the expert on it, and would defer to e.g. the NTSB to decide how companies are behaving with regard to proper testing. The only part I would add is that as a citizen, my strong preference is for the testing to be gradual with a high emphasis on validation and a gradual proof of concept moving from simpler vehicles and situations to more complex ones. Regardless of what the raw machine learning capabilities are in terms of self-driving, this is needed to prove out the evaluation and auditing infrastructure as much as anything else -- essentially to prove that we have a framework for holding the companies accountable in the right ways.