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> There are ~1.25 million car deaths per year (20-50 million injured or disabled), a lot of room for "progress" to save countless lives. The vast majority of t

> There are ~1.25 million car deaths per year (20-50 million injured or disabled), a lot of room for "progress" to save countless lives. The vast majority of those occur in areas that will not see autonomous vehicles for a very long time, and have a lot of environmental challenges that make it much harder for an autonomous vehicle to outperform a human.

mythz 7y ago
and? it's not worth doing unless every life can be saved? The point is thousands of people die per day at the hands of human drivers. The sooner we can transition to autonomous vehicles, the sooner they'll start saving lives.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > and? it's not worth doing unless every life can be saved? I did not say or imply that. > The point is thousands of people die per day at the hands of human drivers. Yes, and thousands will die every day for quite a long time. You make it sound like autonomous vehicles are going to make a significant dent in that number. > The sooner we can transition to autonomous vehicles, the sooner they'll start saving lives. This is quite true. It will just be limited to lives in developed nations and a few select other major cities.
throwaway66920 7y ago
You’re stringing together a few questionable statements here. It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring? On a quick search, 30% of fatalities involve alcohol. 7% involve rain (the most common condition that causes crashes). Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring? My point is that trotting out the 1.25M number when we are very far away from dealing with the vast majority of it is distracting at best. We should instead be talking about the numbers of injuries and fatalities on the countries where autonomous vehicles are most likely to be deployed, and how many of those people could have been saved. > Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk. That's very true, but orthogonal to the point of using realistic numbers.
  - throwaway66920 7y ago
    That seems like arguing about metrics for the sake of it. If we change the definition to be x% reduction in the rate of accidents relative to the expected rate if a non autonomous car would be use otherwise... you would get a similar rate of impact, normalized to a smaller population, limited primarily by rapidly diminishing economic barriers that don’t seem especially relevant to the argument at hanf

mythz 7y ago

and? it's not worth doing unless every life can be saved? The point is thousands of people die per day at the hands of human drivers. The sooner we can transition to autonomous vehicles, the sooner they'll start saving lives.

vonmoltke 7y ago
> and? it's not worth doing unless every life can be saved? I did not say or imply that. > The point is thousands of people die per day at the hands of human drivers. Yes, and thousands will die every day for quite a long time. You make it sound like autonomous vehicles are going to make a significant dent in that number. > The sooner we can transition to autonomous vehicles, the sooner they'll start saving lives. This is quite true. It will just be limited to lives in developed nations and a few select other major cities.

throwaway66920 7y ago

You’re stringing together a few questionable statements here. It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring? On a quick search, 30% of fatalities involve alcohol. 7% involve rain (the most common condition that causes crashes). Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk.

vonmoltke 7y ago
> It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring? My point is that trotting out the 1.25M number when we are very far away from dealing with the vast majority of it is distracting at best. We should instead be talking about the numbers of injuries and fatalities on the countries where autonomous vehicles are most likely to be deployed, and how many of those people could have been saved. > Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk. That's very true, but orthogonal to the point of using realistic numbers.
- throwaway66920 7y ago
  That seems like arguing about metrics for the sake of it. If we change the definition to be x% reduction in the rate of accidents relative to the expected rate if a non autonomous car would be use otherwise... you would get a similar rate of impact, normalized to a smaller population, limited primarily by rapidly diminishing economic barriers that don’t seem especially relevant to the argument at hanf