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Maybe; it's hard to say. I think the reputation of human driving is so low that it's hard to go lower, but opinion on that is pretty polarized. As a bike comm

by dkarl 7y ago

Maybe; it's hard to say. I think the reputation of human driving is so low that it's hard to go lower, but opinion on that is pretty polarized. As a bike commuter in a quickly growing city, I'm aware that there are a lot of people who think driving is a fundamentally safe activity that is only made dangerous by unwelcome novelties such as cyclists, pedestrians, etc. But there's also a lot of awareness that it's really a shit show: humans are terrible drivers who kill people by the thousands every year. It's such an outlier that I don't think normal safety standards apply. I think the only standard that self-driving cars should need to meet is being comparable to human drivers. If self-driving cars replaced humans the day they became safer than human drivers, they would become our second most deadly consumer technology next to guns. Crazy to think about, isn't it? As safety improves, self-driving cars can save thousands of lives per year and still be our second most deadly consumer technology. We should get used to that idea and look forward to cranking the death rate lower and lower as technology improves. Humans behind the wheel will always be a menace.

tjoff 7y ago
Well they are nowhere near human drivers. And yes, human drivers are terrible. Thing is that human drivers vary a lot. So we have excellent drivers and we have awful drivers. And also we have tired drivers, bored drivers, angry drivers and we have sporadically inattentive drivers. If we were to aim for "at least the same number of accidents as a human per mile" that would be a pretty disastrous AI. Because the AI would be much more uniform in its performance. A human driver will send text messages and won't even slow down before hitting a stand-still truck right in front of them. A human driver will mix up the brake pedal and speed straight through an intersection. An AI that does comparable damage (obviously wouldn't make the same mistakes) would be pretty darn scary to sit inside or be near. There is also the very important factor that a self-driving car needs to behave as a human to not cause accidents just with it's presence. The PR disasters that await, when people die because a self-driving car did something that a conscious human would never do people won't react rationally. Tesla are just begging for a, well deserved, ban on self-driving cars and attach a stigma to them. All while killing some people. There is no silver lining to it.

by dkarl 7y ago

tjoff 7y ago

Well they are nowhere near human drivers. And yes, human drivers are terrible. Thing is that human drivers vary a lot. So we have excellent drivers and we have awful drivers. And also we have tired drivers, bored drivers, angry drivers and we have sporadically inattentive drivers. If we were to aim for "at least the same number of accidents as a human per mile" that would be a pretty disastrous AI. Because the AI would be much more uniform in its performance. A human driver will send text messages and won't even slow down before hitting a stand-still truck right in front of them. A human driver will mix up the brake pedal and speed straight through an intersection. An AI that does comparable damage (obviously wouldn't make the same mistakes) would be pretty darn scary to sit inside or be near. There is also the very important factor that a self-driving car needs to behave as a human to not cause accidents just with it's presence. The PR disasters that await, when people die because a self-driving car did something that a conscious human would never do people won't react rationally. Tesla are just begging for a, well deserved, ban on self-driving cars and attach a stigma to them. All while killing some people. There is no silver lining to it.