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I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have t

I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. This trope that humans are bad drivers is, in general, crap. Humans are very good drivers. The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This means if you drive 50km a day, every day, you are (essentially) guaranteed to die... after 7500 YEARS. You have less than a 1 in 10 million chance of dying on any given trip you take. That is NOT risky, and is NOT dangerous.

Joe-Z 8y ago
Cars have gotten so safe though. There's all this measures put in place to ensure your survival _in case of a crash_. Wouldn't it be more relevant to calculate the chances of getting injured / end up in a crash at all? I mean just being caught up in a traffic accident and have no bodily harm done to you can be a traumatic event.
- erobbins 8y ago
  You're not wrong. There are plenty of accidents caused by inattention and poor driving that aren't fatal, but that do result in injuries... a quick search didn't give me much information but crashes with injuries appear to be about 100x more common than fatal crashes. This doesn't take into account how serious the injuries are, however. So if we assume that serious injuries are 10x more common than fatalities, that raises the odds to one incident per 750 years, or 1 incident per 75 years of any accident at all. You're still talking about things that happen to people once or twice in their entire lives. Of course there will be outliers (I've been in 5 accidents myself, only 1 with injuries) but the odds of being in a crash don't seem to be worth the risk of trying to automate mousetraps... we should concentrate on replacing car-based transportation instead of trying to use magical black boxes to make it theoretically safer.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    As an aside, as of 2019, you are more likely to die of an opiate overdose in the US than as a result of a car accident.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  Yes, this is a very important distinction. Humans have gotten pretty good at not getting killed in car accidents, mostly due to increasing safety engineering and assistance features in cars. Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely. In 2016 there were 6.3 million motor vehicle accidents reported to police. And NHTSA estimates about 10 million accidents go unreported each year (mostly minor fender benders and people damaging their own vehicles on fixed objects). To me, that's pretty clear evidence that humans are poor drivers.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely. So far, neither are Teslas...And the point of this reddit thread is that any progress that Tesla does make on this front can be instantly reverted in a future update.
matz1 8y ago
I hope not, yes there will be death, nothing is perfect, but i will just consider it an acceptable loss.
derefr 8y ago
> The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This is a meaningless measurement. Segment those km by where they occur. Most of them are either: 1. "cruise-control compatible" kilometers—e.g. freeway straightaways—where you're surrounded by cars but they're all going the same speed in a straight line, and all you need to do to be safe is to go the same speed in a straight line as well. 2. "closed-course" kilometers—e.g. most rural roads, and most suburban roads any time other than rush-hour—where the road may curve and have intersections and such, but at any given time of day, it's probable that there aren't any other cars (or even pedestrians) on the road for you to collide with, no matter how bad your driving is. (Think "roads you'd have a teenager practice driving on." These roads are good for practice because there are effectively no accidents to get into.) 3. (a smaller segment, but still relevant because of the number of freight kilometers driven here:) "empty" kilometers—this has all the properties of segment 2, but also, the road is at grade, and there's nothing abutting the road (i.e. the road isn't a street), so even if you veer off the road, you're unlikely to hit anything. (Examples: the Nevada desert; Saskatchewan; most farmland.) People point out that the safety-per-km stats for airplanes are a nonsense measurement, because what little crashing that airplanes do tends to mostly occur during the first and last 50km of the planned flight-path—so short flights are just as dangerous as long flights. Well, the same goes for car accidents. Subtract all the "trivial" driving that humans and AIs can both do by just doing... nothing much at all, with no obstacles/hazards to evaluate, let alone react to. The kilometers that are left (freeway merging; city driving; suburban streets during rush-hour; parking in parking lots) are a lot more crash-y, and are the place where both human and AI competence is questionable.
deleted 8y ago
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kirse 8y ago
I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. I try to explain this to friends who are far too optimistic on self-crashing car technology. Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects). Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on some random devteam's backlog, and I have no desire to have a JIRA ticket named in my honor. In my opinion, by the time all the money and effort is spent making SDC's capable of successfully driving from point-A to point-B in the near infinite possible conditions they could encounter, it would have been 50x cheaper to simply build a fully modernized high-speed rail network over existing highways and roads.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  You are saying that the cost to develop successful self-driving cars is 1-50 quadrillion dollars using an optimistic estimate of rail costs. That does not seem reasonable. Perhaps 200 billion across all companies have been invested in self-driving cars so far (I.e., Waymo is just a fraction of that.)
  - kirse 8y ago
    Agree, SWAG was heavily W. Updated. I still think we're 50 years off from near-flawless SDC's though, assuming current LOE.
- albntomat0 8y ago
  > Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on some random devteam's backlog, and I have no desire to have a JIRA ticket named in my honor. Instead you can be the victim in a vehicular manslaughter case due to DUI/texting/etc. As stated elsewhere on this thread, self-driving needs to be measurably better than a human. My state displays how many people have been killed thus far this year on the automatic traffic signs (used for amber alert, traffic info, etc as well). A 20% reduction in the 3000+ folks killed in 2018 would mean a whole lot for those saved.
- tzs 8y ago
  > Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects). One big difference between those classes is what you can do after an accident. With both, you can investigate why it happened and then make recommended changes to prevent it or reduce its chances in the future. But with driver attention problems, such as drunk driving or driving while texting, it is easy for those recommendations to be ignored. We've been telling people not to drive drunk, not to text while driving, and so on for probably a century in the case of drunk driving, and for as long as texting has existed for texting...and people still do them frequently. With a software defect, it is a lot easier to make sure that the fix actually gets deployed. Make it part of the annual registration renewal for cars that all safety updates have been applied to their self-driving systems.
mandeepj 8y ago
> This trope that humans are bad drivers Humans are bad in general. At least, self-driving cars will not be texting or using their phone while driving or involving in road rage. This list is really long. "Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44" https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
MSM 8y ago
You're looking at it strictly from a safety perspective which is a small part of the whole picture. If we looked at transportation from a safety perspective throughout history, we'd still be walking everywhere. What's the risk of crashing and dying while walking? Zero; it's fully optimized for safety. We rode horses and now drive cars to save time. Driving to work is unquestionably a better experience than riding a horse into work every day, but it could be better- we could be sleeping on our way into the office, or starting our work day as we leave our driveway, or eating a good breakfast and finishing our makeup (while not endangering everyone else). Having commuting time available as what amounts to "free time" is an insane boost to daily life. A quick google says Americans spend 12.2 days per year in their cars. If 300 million people can save 12 days' time per year, you're freeing up ten million years of time every year. I'm not advocating for throwing everyone in self driving cars untested and who cares how many people die, but if, on the journey to saving many millennia of time every year, a person is killed, why should the company be sued into oblivion? If we're going to sue everyone into oblivion whenever anything doesn't go quite right, why would any company ever try to take on difficult problems?
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "What's the risk of crashing and dying while walking? Zero; it's fully optimized for safety." Huh? Have you never seen or heard of anyone falling, hitting their head, and causing a concussion and/or death?
deevolution 8y ago
Certainly we can do better than this tho? Your bar for very good driver" is pretty low. I'm sure everyone has at least one acquaintance they know who has died in a car crash. I can count 3 who have died from car crashes and 3 others who have been seriously injured. Humans arent going to get any better at driving. Something has got to change.
m463 8y ago
yet the leading cause of death in youths is automobile accidents: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Causes_of_death_by_age_group_%28percent%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Causes_o...
- perl4ever 8y ago
  Well, we don't need self driving cars to fix that, just a way to increase the fatalities from cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimers in the young.
ec109685 8y ago
30k deaths a year in US, 50 years of driving. That is 1.5M deaths over your lifetime. Let’s say there are 690M drivers throughout your lifetime. You have a quarter of a percent chance of driving being your cause of death. Also, 2.45% of deaths worldwide are from road accidents: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-by-cause-2016 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-by-cause-...

Joe-Z 8y ago

Cars have gotten so safe though. There's all this measures put in place to ensure your survival _in case of a crash_. Wouldn't it be more relevant to calculate the chances of getting injured / end up in a crash at all? I mean just being caught up in a traffic accident and have no bodily harm done to you can be a traumatic event.

erobbins 8y ago
You're not wrong. There are plenty of accidents caused by inattention and poor driving that aren't fatal, but that do result in injuries... a quick search didn't give me much information but crashes with injuries appear to be about 100x more common than fatal crashes. This doesn't take into account how serious the injuries are, however. So if we assume that serious injuries are 10x more common than fatalities, that raises the odds to one incident per 750 years, or 1 incident per 75 years of any accident at all. You're still talking about things that happen to people once or twice in their entire lives. Of course there will be outliers (I've been in 5 accidents myself, only 1 with injuries) but the odds of being in a crash don't seem to be worth the risk of trying to automate mousetraps... we should concentrate on replacing car-based transportation instead of trying to use magical black boxes to make it theoretically safer.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  As an aside, as of 2019, you are more likely to die of an opiate overdose in the US than as a result of a car accident.
mdorazio 8y ago
Yes, this is a very important distinction. Humans have gotten pretty good at not getting killed in car accidents, mostly due to increasing safety engineering and assistance features in cars. Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely. In 2016 there were 6.3 million motor vehicle accidents reported to police. And NHTSA estimates about 10 million accidents go unreported each year (mostly minor fender benders and people damaging their own vehicles on fixed objects). To me, that's pretty clear evidence that humans are poor drivers.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely. So far, neither are Teslas...And the point of this reddit thread is that any progress that Tesla does make on this front can be instantly reverted in a future update.

matz1 8y ago

I hope not, yes there will be death, nothing is perfect, but i will just consider it an acceptable loss.

derefr 8y ago

> The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This is a meaningless measurement. Segment those km by where they occur. Most of them are either: 1. "cruise-control compatible" kilometers—e.g. freeway straightaways—where you're surrounded by cars but they're all going the same speed in a straight line, and all you need to do to be safe is to go the same speed in a straight line as well. 2. "closed-course" kilometers—e.g. most rural roads, and most suburban roads any time other than rush-hour—where the road may curve and have intersections and such, but at any given time of day, it's probable that there aren't any other cars (or even pedestrians) on the road for you to collide with, no matter how bad your driving is. (Think "roads you'd have a teenager practice driving on." These roads are good for practice because there are effectively no accidents to get into.) 3. (a smaller segment, but still relevant because of the number of freight kilometers driven here:) "empty" kilometers—this has all the properties of segment 2, but also, the road is at grade, and there's nothing abutting the road (i.e. the road isn't a street), so even if you veer off the road, you're unlikely to hit anything. (Examples: the Nevada desert; Saskatchewan; most farmland.) People point out that the safety-per-km stats for airplanes are a nonsense measurement, because what little crashing that airplanes do tends to mostly occur during the first and last 50km of the planned flight-path—so short flights are just as dangerous as long flights. Well, the same goes for car accidents. Subtract all the "trivial" driving that humans and AIs can both do by just doing... nothing much at all, with no obstacles/hazards to evaluate, let alone react to. The kilometers that are left (freeway merging; city driving; suburban streets during rush-hour; parking in parking lots) are a lot more crash-y, and are the place where both human and AI competence is questionable.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kirse 8y ago

I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. I try to explain this to friends who are far too optimistic on self-crashing car technology. Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects). Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on some random devteam's backlog, and I have no desire to have a JIRA ticket named in my honor. In my opinion, by the time all the money and effort is spent making SDC's capable of successfully driving from point-A to point-B in the near infinite possible conditions they could encounter, it would have been 50x cheaper to simply build a fully modernized high-speed rail network over existing highways and roads.

1123581321 8y ago
You are saying that the cost to develop successful self-driving cars is 1-50 quadrillion dollars using an optimistic estimate of rail costs. That does not seem reasonable. Perhaps 200 billion across all companies have been invested in self-driving cars so far (I.e., Waymo is just a fraction of that.)
- kirse 8y ago
  Agree, SWAG was heavily W. Updated. I still think we're 50 years off from near-flawless SDC's though, assuming current LOE.
albntomat0 8y ago
> Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on some random devteam's backlog, and I have no desire to have a JIRA ticket named in my honor. Instead you can be the victim in a vehicular manslaughter case due to DUI/texting/etc. As stated elsewhere on this thread, self-driving needs to be measurably better than a human. My state displays how many people have been killed thus far this year on the automatic traffic signs (used for amber alert, traffic info, etc as well). A 20% reduction in the 3000+ folks killed in 2018 would mean a whole lot for those saved.
tzs 8y ago
> Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects). One big difference between those classes is what you can do after an accident. With both, you can investigate why it happened and then make recommended changes to prevent it or reduce its chances in the future. But with driver attention problems, such as drunk driving or driving while texting, it is easy for those recommendations to be ignored. We've been telling people not to drive drunk, not to text while driving, and so on for probably a century in the case of drunk driving, and for as long as texting has existed for texting...and people still do them frequently. With a software defect, it is a lot easier to make sure that the fix actually gets deployed. Make it part of the annual registration renewal for cars that all safety updates have been applied to their self-driving systems.

mandeepj 8y ago

> This trope that humans are bad drivers Humans are bad in general. At least, self-driving cars will not be texting or using their phone while driving or involving in road rage. This list is really long. "Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44" https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

MSM 8y ago

You're looking at it strictly from a safety perspective which is a small part of the whole picture. If we looked at transportation from a safety perspective throughout history, we'd still be walking everywhere. What's the risk of crashing and dying while walking? Zero; it's fully optimized for safety. We rode horses and now drive cars to save time. Driving to work is unquestionably a better experience than riding a horse into work every day, but it could be better- we could be sleeping on our way into the office, or starting our work day as we leave our driveway, or eating a good breakfast and finishing our makeup (while not endangering everyone else). Having commuting time available as what amounts to "free time" is an insane boost to daily life. A quick google says Americans spend 12.2 days per year in their cars. If 300 million people can save 12 days' time per year, you're freeing up ten million years of time every year. I'm not advocating for throwing everyone in self driving cars untested and who cares how many people die, but if, on the journey to saving many millennia of time every year, a person is killed, why should the company be sued into oblivion? If we're going to sue everyone into oblivion whenever anything doesn't go quite right, why would any company ever try to take on difficult problems?

perl4ever 8y ago
"What's the risk of crashing and dying while walking? Zero; it's fully optimized for safety." Huh? Have you never seen or heard of anyone falling, hitting their head, and causing a concussion and/or death?

deevolution 8y ago

Certainly we can do better than this tho? Your bar for very good driver" is pretty low. I'm sure everyone has at least one acquaintance they know who has died in a car crash. I can count 3 who have died from car crashes and 3 others who have been seriously injured. Humans arent going to get any better at driving. Something has got to change.

m463 8y ago

yet the leading cause of death in youths is automobile accidents: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Causes_of_death_by_age_group_%28percent%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Causes_o...

perl4ever 8y ago
Well, we don't need self driving cars to fix that, just a way to increase the fatalities from cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimers in the young.

ec109685 8y ago

30k deaths a year in US, 50 years of driving. That is 1.5M deaths over your lifetime. Let’s say there are 690M drivers throughout your lifetime. You have a quarter of a percent chance of driving being your cause of death. Also, 2.45% of deaths worldwide are from road accidents: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-by-cause-2016 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-by-cause-...