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It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. A 0% accident rate is u

It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. A 0% accident rate is unrealistic and unfair.

macintux 7y ago
Statistics makes for a tough sell to the survivors. “Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”
- kemitche 7y ago
  Assume for a moment that vaccines could actually cause autism at a small rate. Your argument applies there. "Yes your son became autistic, but someone else's son somewhere else didn't get measles and die." I understand there are human emotions involved, but my opinion is that significantly reducing death count is still a better outcome. If we can't accept that noticeably better systems will still have faults, and that those faults will result in a different, but smaller number of deaths, then we're content asking for more deaths than necessary.
  - ipython 7y ago
    You don’t need to assume. With any medical procedure, there is risk involved. Including routine vaccination. That’s why there is a dedicated program to both report and compensate people who suffer adverse reactions from vaccines. See https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html
- diminoten 7y ago
  Striving for 0 accidents and only accepting 0 accidents are two very different things...
- rictic 7y ago
  Ambulances save some number of lives. Ambulances are involved in some number of fatal accidents. Should ambulances be banned? Subsidized? I can imagine different ways of analyzing the question, but asking "what would you say to the families of those who die" is a nonstarter. There's nothing you can say that will be satisfying, or ease their pain. Statistics may be cold, but they're the only tool that actually lets us answer the questions like "would fewer people die with or without this change"?
  - macintux 7y ago
    On the other hand, people know who’s been saved by an ambulance. We’ll never know who was saved by the existence autonomous vehicles. I’m just pointing out there’s a PR problem that may prove tough to manage.
- brownbat 7y ago
  You absolutely can't challenge someone's personal experience with statistics, but something about this line of argument still troubles me. I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year. Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy. ON THE OTHER HAND... We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers. You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents. If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers. Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say. The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.
  - macintux 7y ago
    People understand drunk drivers. They understand distracted drivers. They’re angry, rightfully so, but it’s a known problem and easy to comprehend. We can make laws tougher and feel good about it, even if it doesn’t help much. It’s harder to emotionally cope with, I speculate, when someone you love is killed by a software bug, or by machine learning where no one can precisely explain why it made a certain choice. I’m not saying I’m against autonomy. I just don’t know how to prevent it being caught in a backlash when people who didn’t have to die, do.
    - brownbat 7y ago
      > but it’s a known problem and easy to comprehend... It's harder emotionally... when someone you love is killed by a software bug Sure, I understand how a poorly designed steel guardrail can ride up the front of a vehicle and crush the chest of someone I had hugged a week earlier. My sense is that understanding does not lessen the pain. You seem to basically be trying to explain how hypothetical people that you are imagining could be experiencing pain that is more salient than mine. I don't see how this takes us anywhere good.
AndrewBissell 7y ago
> It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. Eh, Tesla likes to point to this statistic every time the safety of Autopilot comes into question, but it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven. Detailed data is hard to come by, but more nuanced studies have been far from conclusive in favor of the "Autopilot is safer than human drivers" thesis.
- NickM 7y ago
  it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven. True, and that kind of flawed argument bugs me. However, there is also data that showed that accident rates went down significantly on the same cars after Tesla first enabled autopilot via a software update. This is much more compelling to me; if the same people driving the same cars in the same areas became less likely to get into an accident as soon as autopilot became available, then I don't see how you can really argue that the feature is not beneficial to safety.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    This sounds interesting. Are you able to remember where you might have read this?
    - AndrewBissell 7y ago
      I assume he's referring to the NHTSA study which was released on the last day of the Obama administration and purported to show a 40% reduction in crash rates. It's still the highest search result on HN for "Tesla Autopilot." That study was later shown to have employed sketchy data and egregiously flawed methodology. A deeper dive showed that the crash rates may have actually gone up with Autopilot. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. A 0% accident rate is unrealistic and unfair.

macintux 7y ago

Statistics makes for a tough sell to the survivors. “Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”

kemitche 7y ago
Assume for a moment that vaccines could actually cause autism at a small rate. Your argument applies there. "Yes your son became autistic, but someone else's son somewhere else didn't get measles and die." I understand there are human emotions involved, but my opinion is that significantly reducing death count is still a better outcome. If we can't accept that noticeably better systems will still have faults, and that those faults will result in a different, but smaller number of deaths, then we're content asking for more deaths than necessary.
- ipython 7y ago
  You don’t need to assume. With any medical procedure, there is risk involved. Including routine vaccination. That’s why there is a dedicated program to both report and compensate people who suffer adverse reactions from vaccines. See https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html
diminoten 7y ago
Striving for 0 accidents and only accepting 0 accidents are two very different things...
rictic 7y ago
Ambulances save some number of lives. Ambulances are involved in some number of fatal accidents. Should ambulances be banned? Subsidized? I can imagine different ways of analyzing the question, but asking "what would you say to the families of those who die" is a nonstarter. There's nothing you can say that will be satisfying, or ease their pain. Statistics may be cold, but they're the only tool that actually lets us answer the questions like "would fewer people die with or without this change"?
- macintux 7y ago
  On the other hand, people know who’s been saved by an ambulance. We’ll never know who was saved by the existence autonomous vehicles. I’m just pointing out there’s a PR problem that may prove tough to manage.
brownbat 7y ago
You absolutely can't challenge someone's personal experience with statistics, but something about this line of argument still troubles me. I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year. Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy. ON THE OTHER HAND... We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers. You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents. If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers. Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say. The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.
- macintux 7y ago
  People understand drunk drivers. They understand distracted drivers. They’re angry, rightfully so, but it’s a known problem and easy to comprehend. We can make laws tougher and feel good about it, even if it doesn’t help much. It’s harder to emotionally cope with, I speculate, when someone you love is killed by a software bug, or by machine learning where no one can precisely explain why it made a certain choice. I’m not saying I’m against autonomy. I just don’t know how to prevent it being caught in a backlash when people who didn’t have to die, do.
  - brownbat 7y ago
    > but it’s a known problem and easy to comprehend... It's harder emotionally... when someone you love is killed by a software bug Sure, I understand how a poorly designed steel guardrail can ride up the front of a vehicle and crush the chest of someone I had hugged a week earlier. My sense is that understanding does not lessen the pain. You seem to basically be trying to explain how hypothetical people that you are imagining could be experiencing pain that is more salient than mine. I don't see how this takes us anywhere good.

AndrewBissell 7y ago

> It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. Eh, Tesla likes to point to this statistic every time the safety of Autopilot comes into question, but it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven. Detailed data is hard to come by, but more nuanced studies have been far from conclusive in favor of the "Autopilot is safer than human drivers" thesis.

NickM 7y ago
it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven. True, and that kind of flawed argument bugs me. However, there is also data that showed that accident rates went down significantly on the same cars after Tesla first enabled autopilot via a software update. This is much more compelling to me; if the same people driving the same cars in the same areas became less likely to get into an accident as soon as autopilot became available, then I don't see how you can really argue that the feature is not beneficial to safety.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  This sounds interesting. Are you able to remember where you might have read this?
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago
    I assume he's referring to the NHTSA study which was released on the last day of the Obama administration and purported to show a 40% reduction in crash rates. It's still the highest search result on HN for "Tesla Autopilot." That study was later shown to have employed sketchy data and egregiously flawed methodology. A deeper dive showed that the crash rates may have actually gone up with Autopilot. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]