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And likewise? Your spirited defense of the status quo also sacrifices innocent lives. Over 30,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year. Just how much be

by beat 8y ago

And likewise? Your spirited defense of the status quo also sacrifices innocent lives. Over 30,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year. Just how much better do autonomous cars need to be in order to be acceptable to test in the real world? The data and experience gathered from real-world testing should (I'm not saying "will") accelerate the progress to the point you mention - "once their error rate drops below that of a human driver". Let's look at the Uber case, since everyone infers so much from it. One fatality. One. And the program was immediately shut down. And how did it happen? Engineers had deliberately disabled the automated emergency braking system to reduce "erratic behavior", but had no automated notification to the driver. And the driver was distracted, doing data entry for the test as he was instructed to do. If the emergency braking system had been on, it would have stopped the car on time - they have the data for this. This sure looks like human error to me. And that single accident put Uber's program drastically behind schedule, relative to more cautious/thorough competitors. Uber paid a market price for its eager carelessness.

donarb 8y ago
This one incident is not the cause of Uber being behind schedule. They shut down their program in California because they didn't want to follow the rules. So Uber moves to a state with lax rules and a woman paid for it with her life. If Uber was more focused on doing things the right way their program would be much further ahead.
wpietri 8y ago
To test in the real world, they need to be at least as good unless we have strong reason to believe that surplus deaths are the only way to move forward. We don't have reason to believe that. Even Uber now agrees that more simulation should have been done, and they're trying to catch up. All the necessary data for this could have been gleaned from instrumenting human-driven cars, and then testing the object recognition, object avoidance, and other driving algorithms against the resulting data. Uber's Arizona death wasn't "human error". It was negligence. They also weren't "behind schedule" in any meaningful sense; some exec picked a too-aggressive goal, and people cut corners in a vain attempt to meet it. They shouldn't just be paying a "market price". They should be facing charges for criminal negligence leading to involuntary manslaughter.

by beat 8y ago

donarb 8y ago

This one incident is not the cause of Uber being behind schedule. They shut down their program in California because they didn't want to follow the rules. So Uber moves to a state with lax rules and a woman paid for it with her life. If Uber was more focused on doing things the right way their program would be much further ahead.

wpietri 8y ago

To test in the real world, they need to be at least as good unless we have strong reason to believe that surplus deaths are the only way to move forward. We don't have reason to believe that. Even Uber now agrees that more simulation should have been done, and they're trying to catch up. All the necessary data for this could have been gleaned from instrumenting human-driven cars, and then testing the object recognition, object avoidance, and other driving algorithms against the resulting data. Uber's Arizona death wasn't "human error". It was negligence. They also weren't "behind schedule" in any meaningful sense; some exec picked a too-aggressive goal, and people cut corners in a vain attempt to meet it. They shouldn't just be paying a "market price". They should be facing charges for criminal negligence leading to involuntary manslaughter.