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> How did we go from thousands of deaths to zero? Primarily through crashing. No, the reduction in deaths was through not crashing. The airline industry would
by twic 7y ago
> How did we go from thousands of deaths to zero? Primarily through crashing.
No, the reduction in deaths was through not crashing.
The airline industry would not have got safer faster by deliberately doing more crashing. "Okay, we need to increase safety, so let's crash as much as we can!" is something they didn't say, because that wouldn't have made any sense.
What you've done here, and the reason you've been upvoted to the top spot, is you've applied the Silicon Valley mantra of "failure is good" to airlines, and by extension, to autonomous cars. That mantra isn't really even true for software - it's not that failures are good, it's that learning is good - but it just about works in a world where people turn can turn free VC dollars into Medium posts and acqui-hires by failing, and hence where you might as well learn that way, rather than proceeding slowly with painstaking care; this approach doesn't really work in worlds where failures are underlined in blood.
- double0jimb0 7y agoI’d really like to see the details of the “proceeding slowly with painstaking care” looks like. Airplanes never had airbags, crumple zones, etc. The odds of surviving a car crash are much higher than odds of surviving a plane crash. It seems therefore that testing in cars can be done with lower risk of loss of life. Yes, there will be fender benders and some deaths.
- mcguire 7y agoNASA manned space flight.
- DuskStar 7y ago> NASA manned space flight. NASA is horrible at keeping astronauts alive. Worse than the Soviets/Russians, as far as I know. Apollo 1 and the two Shuttle disasters do not paint a good picture for NASA's safety in practice.
- mcguire 7y agoNASA is great at keeping astronauts alive. It has no launch vehicles.