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I think the public will accept a small number of human fatalities, if they arise from things like people crossing the street at night away from an intersection.
by PopePompus 7y ago
I think the public will accept a small number of human fatalities, if they arise from things like people crossing the street at night away from an intersection. Most drivers have had close calls like that themselves. What I think will really set self-driving cars back is if they kill someone in a situation where a human driver clearly would not have. If a self-driving car runs over a six year old girl standing in a street because she's wearing an oddly striped dress that the car classifies as a sewer grate - that will be a disaster for the industry.
- jedberg 7y agoAgain, that's because humans are bad at statistics. Even if it has that odd behavior, what about all the accidents a self-driver avoids that humans can't, because it has 360 degree vision and much faster reflexes? You never hear about those, because they they happen all the time and don't make headlines. But clearly they avoid accidents humans don't, because their accident rate if far fewer per mile.
- gooseus 7y agoI'm really curious where you live or work such that your self-driving cars are better than your Uber/Lyft rides and you're observing all these near misses where a real human would have definitely had an accident? Also, I assume you are also considering all the times that humans entirely avoided dangerous situations that self-driving car wouldn't because they were able to anticipate the actions/movements of (possibly several) other actors/objects and even communicate with these other actors to negotiate intersections? Do you have a source for the data that says self-driving cars have fewer accidents per mile? Does that include miles driven on closed tracks or is it just orders of magnitude lower than the miles driven by humans and less statistically significant?
- jedberg 7y agoI live in Cupertino near Mt. View. I see Waymo and Apple self drivers daily as both a driver and pedestrian. And I see the Cruise and Zoox cars every time I go to SF. I'm interested in the space so I observe how they act.
- MegaButts 7y agoI see those cars get stuck at intersections with cars honking at them all the time (it feels like a daily occurrence, but that's probably my memory exaggerating the issue). The problem with anecdotal evidence is we don't have the data on how good/bad it really is. I can say as an SF resident that I hate those cars and driving around them is obnoxious because they brake check randomly and are unpredictable.
- lukifer 7y agoI think it has less to do with statistics than the feeling/perception of agency. No matter the risks associating with manual driving that are completely out of your control, driving a car can feel relatively safe because it's your own hands on the wheel. Contrast with fears regarding air travel, where one is a mere passenger with no influence over the flight, despite orders of magnitude of greater safety statistically.
- microtherion 7y agoSarah Gailey wrote a Hugo nominated short story (camouflaged as a scholarly publication) about this scenario: https://firesidefiction.com/stet https://firesidefiction.com/stet