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Since I don't think anyone on hackernews thinks much different, I feel like defending the other side of this: Yes, in theory self-driving cars can be safer than

by nothis 7y ago

Since I don't think anyone on hackernews thinks much different, I feel like defending the other side of this: Yes, in theory self-driving cars can be safer than human drivers. But the tech simply isn't mature. It just isn't. Early tech always has hiccups, not the ones that are calculated into the risk but the ones no one expects. So there's a somewhat high probability that a bug that works totally different from what anyone expects is just waiting to happen and it's steering a 4000 pound block of metal. Let's start this, but it's okay to start slow.

King-Aaron 7y ago
> So there's a somewhat high probability that a bug that works totally different from what anyone expects is just waiting to happen and it's steering a 4000 pound block of metal Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence? Because that statement rings true for both, lol.
- AdieuToLogic 7y ago
  >> So there's a somewhat high probability that a bug that works totally different from what anyone expects is just waiting to happen and it's steering a 4000 pound block of metal > Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence? > Because that statement rings true for both, lol. Your stated position gives far too much credit to algorithms and far too little to what every capable human driver can do.
  - cthaeh 7y ago
    U give far to much credit to human drivers. Capable human drivers as a subset of human drivers. A large subset to be sure,but nowhere near everyone. At least an av cant get drunk.
    - AdieuToLogic 7y ago
      > U give far to much credit to human drivers. The data available challenges this contention. According to here[0], one estimate is that there are approximately 18,000,000 people driving at any given time in the U.S. And according to here[1], there were 34,439 traffic fatalities in the U.S. for the calendar year of 2016. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that of the 18 million drivers in the U.S. on the road at any given time, there are at least two other drivers which are not on the road at that same time. Further, let's assume these are all of the U.S. drivers for the entire 2016 calendar year. This would put the estimated set of unique drivers at 54,000,000. A conservative estimate by any means. This makes the estimated probability of a human driver being involved in a traffic fatality for the 2016 calendar year to be 34439 : 54000000, or 0.00063776. According to here[2], the probability of being struck by lightning in the U.S. is approximately 1 : 280000, or 0.00000357. While the former is mathematically 200x more probable, the latter is statistically insignificant. > Capable human drivers as a subset of human drivers. Hence my qualification of "capable", included in order to obviate edge condition "whataboutism." > At least an av cant get drunk. But it can get defective updates, be unable to identify unknown conditions, suffer from misidentification of threats, and susceptible to cascading failures affecting all autonomous vehicles in the same situations. 0 - https://www.quora.com/How-many-drivers-are-on-the-road-at-any-given-time-in-the-US https://www.quora.com/How-many-drivers-are-on-the-road-at-an... 1 - https://safer-america.com/car-accident-statistics/#US https://safer-america.com/car-accident-statistics/#US 2 - http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/probability.html http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/probability.html
      - gibolt 7y ago
        18,000,000 seems pretty high. That might be peak. I doubt >5% of the population is the driver (not passenger) in a vehicle all day.
        AdieuToLogic 7y ago
        > 18,000,000 seems pretty high. That might be peak. I doubt >5% of the population is the driver (not passenger) in a vehicle all day. True, that estimation may be peak load. Which is why I kept the total estimate of distinct drivers at 54m instead of the much more likely number of well above[0] that. 0 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter4.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...
    - mandeepj 7y ago
      > At least an av cant get drunk. Far worse can happen, when it gets hacked.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Not bugs but rather design limitations. For example, the basic design limitation of Tesla's autopilot, which causes it to crash into stationary objects: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar. That's the real risk with self-driving systems. Bugs are sporadic. But design limitations create the risk that you could have mass-accident events if everyone on the road runs into the same edge case at the same time.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Tesla’s self driving implementation is very behind Waymo’s, they don’t even use LIDAR. Yes, Musk or Uber could drag the whole self driving reputation in the dirt easily with substandard tech.
    - bobsil1 7y ago
      We don't shoot lasers out of our eyes either.
      - arrrg 7y ago
        And birds don’t have turbines or propellers. I don’t understand the argument?
jussij 7y ago
Except humans are also steering those 4000 pound blocks of metal around and not doing such a great job of it. Here in Australia, with a population of 25 Million there where 1,140 road deaths in 2018. The USA with it's 327 million population had some 40,000 road deaths on 2018. I find it hard to imagine the av will end up doing any worse a job driving than the humans currently on the road. And since, even with the occasional bug, the av would be doing a better job of it, that means they will end up saving lives (and lots of them).
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Do we really want to turn this into a numbers game? The difference between those two scenarios is that different people will die. It also assumes we all adopt AVs too. Now of course everybody has equal value, but are you prepared to accept that a software bug and a lapse in human judgement are also equal? Without accepting that at a societal level the average person will not accept AVs. Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again, or be punished if alcohol was involved. With an AV, currently nobody knows. It could be as simple as "we've checked in the bugfix to prevent this from happening again" with no emotion behind it.
  - foob 7y ago
    Hasn't the rise of Uber and Lyft already turned it into a numbers game? I get drivers that I would consider below average all the time, and I don't have any control over which driver I get. Even when you're the one driving, you have no control over whether the car in front of you is being driven by a good driver or somebody texting who might cause an accident that endangers you. I agree that it needs to be accepted on a societal level, but if you can definitively say "self driving cars are safer than the average Uber driver," then I don't think it will be that hard of a sell. That's especially true if it results in less expensive rides in addition to lower crash rates.
    - gibolt 7y ago
      This. For the majority of fatalities, the driver that caused the accident is rarely among the dead. They are generally in another vehicle. Everything is random. Decreasing the odds of failure will kill individuals, but even a software edge case can cause a phone to explode. The assumption we are always in control is what needs to change.
ianamartin 7y ago
The problem is where people set up the goal posts and have a double standard for human vs. ai driven cars. AI cars, for some reason, are expected to produce an error rate of 0 right off the bat and ever single incident gets used to feed an existing (and often legitimate) narrative about tech bro laziness and irresponsibility. Meanwhile 1.25 million people die in human caused car accidents every year and somewhere around an additional 30 million are injured. But that’s “just the world we live in.” Or that’s “your choice to take a risk when you choose to drive a car.” Or whatever. A lot of criticism of our industry is well-deserved if overly broadly applied. Most companies do not operate with the total lack of ethics that Uber and Facebook do. But they are so big and so well-known, they’ve come to symbolize a culture of amorality, deception, manipulation, and a willingness to do anything for growth and fresh injections of VC funding. What would be really useful for everyone is to throw out that narrative for a while and focus on the task at hand. Self-driving cars will be regulated. There’s no getting around that. And tech companies could help themselves out a lot by accepting that and coming to the table with regulators with an actual plan instead of whining about having their innovation stifled. There is a reasonable compromise. You can’t start by saying the error rate must be at zero. That will never get anywhere and people will keep dying a million a year. Where is the right number and what does it measure? I don’t know. It should probably be tiered by population density and average driving conditions and weighted by number of annual deaths in that city/region. Highways are an easier problem to solve than, say, Manhattan. But highway deaths are more likely to be fatal. So the standards ought to apply differently. The challenge here is really to get regulators to think a little bit like problem solvers rather than enforcers for a change. To get them to realize that “regulate self driving cars” is a problem so big and mushy that it’s pretty much meaningless. But “establish safety standard for interstate travel for autonomous trucks” is something you can work with. Maybe it’s 100x as a safe as a human driver in that scenario. I don’t really know. Tech companies could probably turn on a lot of positive PR if they promoted milestones for certain communities. Maybe even offered incentives for cities to improve road markings. Like if Waymo said, “We want to target Brooklyn, and our goal is 10x as safe as human drivers in Brooklyn with an additional target of 1000x fewer cycling accidents. But we need you to mark the bike lanes better and put them between the parked cars and the curbs where it’s feasible, and here’s a pile of money you can use to do it.” That would generate a lot of good will, positive pr, and maybe even genuine enthusiasm that they can use to open up that market for their taxis ahead of schedule. The car companies will get a lot better treatment from regulators if they chunk the problem into small pieces and go to the negotiating table without a victim chip on their shoulder.
knocte 7y ago
> But the tech simply isn't mature. I guess this is your informed opinion that comes after reading about Tesla's autopilot crashes. And I share that opinion. But I have the feeling that Waymo's system is much more mature than Tesla's. Let's see.
- mandeepj 7y ago
  > But I have the feeling that Waymo's system is much more mature than Tesla's. Let's see. No way. Not even close by any factor. Tesla have real data from real people driving real cars across the world. On the other hand, Waymo have data only from their Test vehicles and augmented scenarios.
  - danmaz74 7y ago
    Data from people driving their own cars is much less relevant than data from your own autonomous driving system driving among real drivers in many different situations (eg urban driving). AFAIK, Waymo has much more of the latter.
    - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
      Tesla has much more of the latter. Their driving system is already deployed and used in consumer vechicles, each of them able to collect that data. Watch "Autonomy day".
      - danmaz74 7y ago
        Tesla has more data only for the very few situations where you can use the autopilot.
        mandeepj 7y ago
        Autopilot ON has logged a billion miles. So, not really "few situations". https://electrek.co/2018/11/28/tesla-autopilot-1-billion-miles/ https://electrek.co/2018/11/28/tesla-autopilot-1-billion-mil...
hooande 7y ago
ok, controversial counterpoint: maybe some number of deaths is worth it. We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to find and fix bugs is to implement the thing in production and see what happens. As you point out, it exposes problems that testing and design just can't. I see people here obsessing over how much will change if we had fleets of AVs. Maybe shaving five years off the wait time is worth N number of human lives. Especially if N < the number of lives will ultimately be saved if the technology is perfected years earlier. Of course I wouldn't want myself or my loved ones to make that sacrifice. I don't want to die in a regular car accident either. Given the upside, speeding up AV development may be worth the risk?
- blub 7y ago
  That's perfectly fair if the cars will be exclusively tested on the families of the engineers & managers working on those cars. This would set the incentives straight at least.
  - otakucode 7y ago
    I would be more comfortable limiting it to the families of the managers. The engineers, due to our legal and social system, have almost no control whatsoever over when the product gets released, what tools they have access to, how much time they are given for testing, etc. All of those decisions are driven by management who have been guaranteed by courts that there simply is no degree of corner-cutting which could ever possibly amount to criminal negligence because software is involved.
- Svip 7y ago
  > ok, controversial counterpoint: maybe some number of deaths is worth it. Not if you wish to win the hearts and minds of the general population at large. As grandparent points out, the coverage seems disproportionate, but that's because it interest people, and they are generally sceptical of letting computers drive their cars. While technically unrelated, the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS scandal hasn't done much good either for the further automation of transport systems. People dying at the 'hands' of AVs will lead to pushback from the general population, and political points can be scored by siding with this view, leading to tigther regulation if not an outright ban some places on AVs. The real question is; will either the slow and thorough approach or the quick and dirty approach roll out larger AV fleets faster than the other? In any case, it'll probably be decades, before there are significant AV fleets.
mathattack 7y ago
Remember there are costs on both sides. The US had ~35k traffic fatalities each year. If you put a 5mm value on a life (roughly what the insurance companies do) then that is 185 billion in cost every year. Cutting that in half saves nearly a trillion dollars and almost 200,000 lives. It’s a huge moral and economic imperative to do this.

by nothis 7y ago

King-Aaron 7y ago

> So there's a somewhat high probability that a bug that works totally different from what anyone expects is just waiting to happen and it's steering a 4000 pound block of metal Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence? Because that statement rings true for both, lol.

AdieuToLogic 7y ago
>> So there's a somewhat high probability that a bug that works totally different from what anyone expects is just waiting to happen and it's steering a 4000 pound block of metal > Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence? > Because that statement rings true for both, lol. Your stated position gives far too much credit to algorithms and far too little to what every capable human driver can do.
- cthaeh 7y ago
  U give far to much credit to human drivers. Capable human drivers as a subset of human drivers. A large subset to be sure,but nowhere near everyone. At least an av cant get drunk.
  - AdieuToLogic 7y ago
    > U give far to much credit to human drivers. The data available challenges this contention. According to here[0], one estimate is that there are approximately 18,000,000 people driving at any given time in the U.S. And according to here[1], there were 34,439 traffic fatalities in the U.S. for the calendar year of 2016. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that of the 18 million drivers in the U.S. on the road at any given time, there are at least two other drivers which are not on the road at that same time. Further, let's assume these are all of the U.S. drivers for the entire 2016 calendar year. This would put the estimated set of unique drivers at 54,000,000. A conservative estimate by any means. This makes the estimated probability of a human driver being involved in a traffic fatality for the 2016 calendar year to be 34439 : 54000000, or 0.00063776. According to here[2], the probability of being struck by lightning in the U.S. is approximately 1 : 280000, or 0.00000357. While the former is mathematically 200x more probable, the latter is statistically insignificant. > Capable human drivers as a subset of human drivers. Hence my qualification of "capable", included in order to obviate edge condition "whataboutism." > At least an av cant get drunk. But it can get defective updates, be unable to identify unknown conditions, suffer from misidentification of threats, and susceptible to cascading failures affecting all autonomous vehicles in the same situations. 0 - https://www.quora.com/How-many-drivers-are-on-the-road-at-any-given-time-in-the-US https://www.quora.com/How-many-drivers-are-on-the-road-at-an... 1 - https://safer-america.com/car-accident-statistics/#US https://safer-america.com/car-accident-statistics/#US 2 - http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/probability.html http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/probability.html
    - gibolt 7y ago
      18,000,000 seems pretty high. That might be peak. I doubt >5% of the population is the driver (not passenger) in a vehicle all day.
      - AdieuToLogic 7y ago
        > 18,000,000 seems pretty high. That might be peak. I doubt >5% of the population is the driver (not passenger) in a vehicle all day. True, that estimation may be peak load. Which is why I kept the total estimate of distinct drivers at 54m instead of the much more likely number of well above[0] that. 0 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter4.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...
  - mandeepj 7y ago
    > At least an av cant get drunk. Far worse can happen, when it gets hacked.
rayiner 7y ago
Not bugs but rather design limitations. For example, the basic design limitation of Tesla's autopilot, which causes it to crash into stationary objects: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar. That's the real risk with self-driving systems. Bugs are sporadic. But design limitations create the risk that you could have mass-accident events if everyone on the road runs into the same edge case at the same time.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Tesla’s self driving implementation is very behind Waymo’s, they don’t even use LIDAR. Yes, Musk or Uber could drag the whole self driving reputation in the dirt easily with substandard tech.
  - bobsil1 7y ago
    We don't shoot lasers out of our eyes either.
    - arrrg 7y ago
      And birds don’t have turbines or propellers. I don’t understand the argument?

jussij 7y ago

Except humans are also steering those 4000 pound blocks of metal around and not doing such a great job of it. Here in Australia, with a population of 25 Million there where 1,140 road deaths in 2018. The USA with it's 327 million population had some 40,000 road deaths on 2018. I find it hard to imagine the av will end up doing any worse a job driving than the humans currently on the road. And since, even with the occasional bug, the av would be doing a better job of it, that means they will end up saving lives (and lots of them).

cameronbrown 7y ago
Do we really want to turn this into a numbers game? The difference between those two scenarios is that different people will die. It also assumes we all adopt AVs too. Now of course everybody has equal value, but are you prepared to accept that a software bug and a lapse in human judgement are also equal? Without accepting that at a societal level the average person will not accept AVs. Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again, or be punished if alcohol was involved. With an AV, currently nobody knows. It could be as simple as "we've checked in the bugfix to prevent this from happening again" with no emotion behind it.
- foob 7y ago
  Hasn't the rise of Uber and Lyft already turned it into a numbers game? I get drivers that I would consider below average all the time, and I don't have any control over which driver I get. Even when you're the one driving, you have no control over whether the car in front of you is being driven by a good driver or somebody texting who might cause an accident that endangers you. I agree that it needs to be accepted on a societal level, but if you can definitively say "self driving cars are safer than the average Uber driver," then I don't think it will be that hard of a sell. That's especially true if it results in less expensive rides in addition to lower crash rates.
  - gibolt 7y ago
    This. For the majority of fatalities, the driver that caused the accident is rarely among the dead. They are generally in another vehicle. Everything is random. Decreasing the odds of failure will kill individuals, but even a software edge case can cause a phone to explode. The assumption we are always in control is what needs to change.

ianamartin 7y ago

The problem is where people set up the goal posts and have a double standard for human vs. ai driven cars. AI cars, for some reason, are expected to produce an error rate of 0 right off the bat and ever single incident gets used to feed an existing (and often legitimate) narrative about tech bro laziness and irresponsibility. Meanwhile 1.25 million people die in human caused car accidents every year and somewhere around an additional 30 million are injured. But that’s “just the world we live in.” Or that’s “your choice to take a risk when you choose to drive a car.” Or whatever. A lot of criticism of our industry is well-deserved if overly broadly applied. Most companies do not operate with the total lack of ethics that Uber and Facebook do. But they are so big and so well-known, they’ve come to symbolize a culture of amorality, deception, manipulation, and a willingness to do anything for growth and fresh injections of VC funding. What would be really useful for everyone is to throw out that narrative for a while and focus on the task at hand. Self-driving cars will be regulated. There’s no getting around that. And tech companies could help themselves out a lot by accepting that and coming to the table with regulators with an actual plan instead of whining about having their innovation stifled. There is a reasonable compromise. You can’t start by saying the error rate must be at zero. That will never get anywhere and people will keep dying a million a year. Where is the right number and what does it measure? I don’t know. It should probably be tiered by population density and average driving conditions and weighted by number of annual deaths in that city/region. Highways are an easier problem to solve than, say, Manhattan. But highway deaths are more likely to be fatal. So the standards ought to apply differently. The challenge here is really to get regulators to think a little bit like problem solvers rather than enforcers for a change. To get them to realize that “regulate self driving cars” is a problem so big and mushy that it’s pretty much meaningless. But “establish safety standard for interstate travel for autonomous trucks” is something you can work with. Maybe it’s 100x as a safe as a human driver in that scenario. I don’t really know. Tech companies could probably turn on a lot of positive PR if they promoted milestones for certain communities. Maybe even offered incentives for cities to improve road markings. Like if Waymo said, “We want to target Brooklyn, and our goal is 10x as safe as human drivers in Brooklyn with an additional target of 1000x fewer cycling accidents. But we need you to mark the bike lanes better and put them between the parked cars and the curbs where it’s feasible, and here’s a pile of money you can use to do it.” That would generate a lot of good will, positive pr, and maybe even genuine enthusiasm that they can use to open up that market for their taxis ahead of schedule. The car companies will get a lot better treatment from regulators if they chunk the problem into small pieces and go to the negotiating table without a victim chip on their shoulder.

knocte 7y ago

> But the tech simply isn't mature. I guess this is your informed opinion that comes after reading about Tesla's autopilot crashes. And I share that opinion. But I have the feeling that Waymo's system is much more mature than Tesla's. Let's see.

mandeepj 7y ago
> But I have the feeling that Waymo's system is much more mature than Tesla's. Let's see. No way. Not even close by any factor. Tesla have real data from real people driving real cars across the world. On the other hand, Waymo have data only from their Test vehicles and augmented scenarios.
- danmaz74 7y ago
  Data from people driving their own cars is much less relevant than data from your own autonomous driving system driving among real drivers in many different situations (eg urban driving). AFAIK, Waymo has much more of the latter.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    Tesla has much more of the latter. Their driving system is already deployed and used in consumer vechicles, each of them able to collect that data. Watch "Autonomy day".
    - danmaz74 7y ago
      Tesla has more data only for the very few situations where you can use the autopilot.
      - mandeepj 7y ago
        Autopilot ON has logged a billion miles. So, not really "few situations". https://electrek.co/2018/11/28/tesla-autopilot-1-billion-miles/ https://electrek.co/2018/11/28/tesla-autopilot-1-billion-mil...

hooande 7y ago

ok, controversial counterpoint: maybe some number of deaths is worth it. We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to find and fix bugs is to implement the thing in production and see what happens. As you point out, it exposes problems that testing and design just can't. I see people here obsessing over how much will change if we had fleets of AVs. Maybe shaving five years off the wait time is worth N number of human lives. Especially if N < the number of lives will ultimately be saved if the technology is perfected years earlier. Of course I wouldn't want myself or my loved ones to make that sacrifice. I don't want to die in a regular car accident either. Given the upside, speeding up AV development may be worth the risk?

blub 7y ago
That's perfectly fair if the cars will be exclusively tested on the families of the engineers & managers working on those cars. This would set the incentives straight at least.
- otakucode 7y ago
  I would be more comfortable limiting it to the families of the managers. The engineers, due to our legal and social system, have almost no control whatsoever over when the product gets released, what tools they have access to, how much time they are given for testing, etc. All of those decisions are driven by management who have been guaranteed by courts that there simply is no degree of corner-cutting which could ever possibly amount to criminal negligence because software is involved.
Svip 7y ago
> ok, controversial counterpoint: maybe some number of deaths is worth it. Not if you wish to win the hearts and minds of the general population at large. As grandparent points out, the coverage seems disproportionate, but that's because it interest people, and they are generally sceptical of letting computers drive their cars. While technically unrelated, the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS scandal hasn't done much good either for the further automation of transport systems. People dying at the 'hands' of AVs will lead to pushback from the general population, and political points can be scored by siding with this view, leading to tigther regulation if not an outright ban some places on AVs. The real question is; will either the slow and thorough approach or the quick and dirty approach roll out larger AV fleets faster than the other? In any case, it'll probably be decades, before there are significant AV fleets.

mathattack 7y ago

Remember there are costs on both sides. The US had ~35k traffic fatalities each year. If you put a 5mm value on a life (roughly what the insurance companies do) then that is 185 billion in cost every year. Cutting that in half saves nearly a trillion dollars and almost 200,000 lives. It’s a huge moral and economic imperative to do this.