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The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mi

• macspoofing 7y ago
  >even if the failure rate is on average /better/ Which has not been true thus far. That's the problem. > The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science. Why shouldn't it be higher? Why shouldn't it be on the level of airline travel?
  • ghaff 7y ago
    >Why shouldn't it be on the level of airline travel? In all fairness, commercial airlines operate in an environment that's mostly highly regulated with respect to maintenance, training, traffic management, etc. But I agree with your general point. After all--except arguably with respect to some drug side effects--there isn't really any consumer-facing product that regularly kills people and we shrug out shoulders and say "Hey, stuff happens" and get on with our day.
    • vasilipupkin 7y ago
      Tons: alcohol being just one example.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        Substances used to excess and technology like electricity used improperly are in a different category than consumer-facing products that can kill you randomly through no fault of your own.
        • vasilipupkin 7y ago
          Why?. Alcohol is a consumer product sold everywhere and is one of the main killers.
          • Recurecur 7y ago
            Tobacco is an even better example, in that even when used in the "recommended" way it's often fatal.
            • ghaff 7y ago
              And there was a very large settlement related to tobacco. Legal "drugs" and unhealthy foods are something of a special case. They've been around for a very long time and we've decided as a society we're mostly accepting of them and have greater or lesser restrictions on their purchase and use. But we're pretty unaccepting of consumer products that are assumed to be safe and then blow up or malfunction in some manner that kills a user minding their own business and not doing anything wrong.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    > Why shouldn't it be higher? Why shouldn't it be on the level of airline travel? Who said it shouldn't?
    • macspoofing 7y ago
      OP. He was bemoaning the fact that we hold driverless cars to a higher standard than average drivers.
      • icebraining 7y ago
        I think OP was just pointing out a fact, not bemoaning.
• baroffoos 7y ago
  >While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same Ideally we should not be accepting either. It is outrageous how many people we allow to be killed regularly for slightly more comfortable transport.
  • DuskStar 7y ago
    Some number of deaths will always occur due to the tradeoffs we make in transportation. We can minimize this number, but even "no cars, no bikes, no trains, no planes, no going outside" would cause deaths due to the lack of things like ambulance or fire services. (and of course if you allow those, someone small number of people will die in crashes)
  • handpanda 7y ago
    I think there's an implicit bargain made when you get in a car that a person is driving: you're both risking your lives on this journey. A self-driving car is risking possibly millions of dollars and bad publicity, but not a life. It's hard to trust a computer like that.
    • pkulak 7y ago
      Which is why the recennt spike in pedestrian and bicycle deaths is even more alarming.
    • mlang23 7y ago
      Ultimately, you dont have to trust a computer. You have to trust the corporation that built that computer. That is quite different IMO. How am I supposed to entrust my life to a machine built by a corporation that just recently dropped the slogan "we wont do evil"? How am I going to entrust my life to a machine that has been built by a company that, like all the others, is maily interested in maximising profit margins? Why should I believe they care about my health as an individual? As you said, if I am passenger of a human driver, I can at least hope they dont want to die. If the machine crashes itself, who cares?
      • 7y ago
• rhino369 7y ago
  I think the fundamental issue Musk has is that his cars can’t drive safer than even a below average driver. Oh wow, it can stay in a lane and match speed! So can every car manufacturer. They’ve got a level 2+ system and cars won’t be safer until level 4.
  • robotresearcher 7y ago
    Do you have data that supports what you think?
    • rayiner 7y ago
      https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
      • robotresearcher 7y ago
        That article describes a failure of Tesla’s system that had terrible consequences. It gives no data comparing with human performance.
        • rayiner 7y ago
          That article describes a systematic design defect of Tesla’s system. (It’s a defect that all camera based systems have. They are designed to ignore stationary objects because they can’t adequately distinguish background objects from obstacles.) Car and Driver tested this last year, and the Tesla ran into the stationary dummy nearly every time. This is something humans have almost no problem dealing with.
          • robotresearcher 7y ago
            Assuming what you say is true, is the Tesla system worse than a human driver overall in its operating domain? Humans have weaknesses too. What do the data say on their relative performance? I’m not taking a position here, just asking for data.
• unityByFreedom 7y ago
  > The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science. I agree. This isn't about beating the national safety average, which includes drunk driving accidents, inclement weather, motorcycles, old cars and unwieldy trucks. It's about providing a safer alternative in scenarios where you have no other. And, it probably needs to be affordable too. There is a lot of other low-hanging fruit to which we apply vision technology (like early cancer detection!), it's too bad investors are climbing over each other to throw money down the long, narrow corridor that is self driving.
  • Slartie 7y ago
    > it's too bad investors are climbing over each other to throw money down the long, narrow corridor that is self driving I don't consider that bad. Anyone is free to make bad investments. I do consider it bad that they haven't yet had to book that many losses, due to the hype still going strong and them finding enough other idiots to join the party. I'm longing for the day on which bad investment decisions (such as in autonomous vehicles, at least if you expect them to be just around the corner to save your business model) seriously wipe out huge investments again - as it should be.
    • unityByFreedom 7y ago
      > I don't consider that bad. Anyone is free to make bad investments. You don't find it unfortunate when capital is allocated towards failing business models rather than tech that has real promise?
      • Slartie 7y ago
        Not as long as this situation does not persist for too long. The market is supposed to correct such inefficiencies by dividing such failing investors from their money and conversely rewarding investors in successful and sustainable business models with that money. The actual problem is not that investment errors are made. Such errors will always be made, as long as it's impossible to predict the future. The problem is that it appears as if right now, we are in a situation in which the negative consequences of such errors can seemingly be postponed virtually forever into the future. Or at least that has worked great for a decade now (first cracks are appearing lately, but it's far from enough yet).
• goatinaboat 7y ago
  The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science. One bad driver kills themselves and maybe a handful of others. One bad software update kills... everyone. So, the demand that the software be near-perfect is not at all unreasonable. It’s strange not to acknowledge this fundamental difference.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • zrm 7y ago
    Problems like that have technical solutions. You phase in updates over time. A hundred vehicles a day for the first week after release, then a thousand a day, then ten thousand a day and so on. That way if there is a serious bug, you find it when it's running on hundreds of cars rather than hundreds of millions.
    • listenallyall 7y ago
      Just like 346 people flying Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines became unwilling parts of a "technical solution". No thanks.
      • zrm 7y ago
        Unless you think we should stop having computers in planes, what are you proposing as a solution to that? More to the point, what does it have to do with systemic risk or reducing it by staggering updates?
        • listenallyall 7y ago
          The comment was criticizing your flippant attitude towards treating humans like beta testers, with the attitude that it's OK to kill a few, just not too many, and dismissal of goatinaboat's initial concern. I don't have a specific answer, because I agree that it's a problem far different than rolling out updates of a new browser version on everyone's laptop. "Technical solutions" acceptable in that scenario simply aren't good enough when the "OS" is speeding down the highway at 75 miles per hour.
• theieindjri 7y ago
  I don't understand why so many otherwise smart people fell for FSD hype. I'm not talking about the many con artists - I'm talking about the tech-savvy people who genuinely bought into FSD hype. How is it not obvious that FSD most likely requires artificial general intelligence and is, thus, probably somewhere between "many decades away" and "humans will never achieve it"?
  • vladislav 7y ago
    It takes a while to internalize what's difficult about the problem. Partly I think it's that humans take for granted their ability to see, which requires no conscious effort but expends 70% of the brain's computational resources at any time. It's not clear AGI is required... computer vision is not known to definitely be AI-complete. It's a very difficult problem but could potentially be solved in the next several years.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    If I had to have an opinion, this would be it. I don't see why self-driving vehicles can't be dependant on additional self-driving-vehicle-related-signage or sensors embedded in / around / near roads, etc etc. Humans are fairly dependant on additional signage, maps, and navigation tools (Google / Apple Maps).
    • mlonkibjuyhv 7y ago
      I would say safety dictates that the car would still have to be safe when such external signals are either missing, wrong or flat out hostile. At that point I don't really see the value they provide.
      • josefx 7y ago
        Make it self driving on specifically marked highways and switch to manual on normal roads. That would free up hours for many people and might even improve traffic congestion.
    • larzang 7y ago
• koonsolo 7y ago
  The same can be said about airplanes, which have a way longer history of automation. Anything in an airplane is automated: takeoff, flying and landing. Pilots make mistakes all the time, but they still need to do things manually to keep their practice high. People just do not want to go in an airplane without any pilots. In metro's it's not that obvious if someone is driving it or not. But airplanes, 'we' want a human pilot to be in control, else we feel unsafe. I think the same can be said about cars.
  • random_upvoter 7y ago
    > Anything in an airplane is automated: takeoff, flying and landing With airplanes there's a whole system in place to make sure that every airplane essentially gets its own private road. This simplifies the problem of automation immensely.
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      For airliners and other IFR traffic, that is almost (but not quite) true. In the US, the overwhelming majority of airspace below 18K feet and the vast majority of airports do not require any air-traffic-control interaction at all. It's "see and avoid" under VFR in those areas.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • froidpink 7y ago
    My favourite pinnacle moment in the history of plane automation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJkEYAy7Qc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJkEYAy7Qc4
  • nradov 7y ago
    "Feeling" has nothing to do with the issue. Current autopilots are generally unable to cope with equipment failures. The pilots are primarily there to deal with unexpected failure modes.
    • 7y ago
• mxcrossb 7y ago
  Is this really true though? Frequently I hear claims that safety standards are too strict and liability too great, but all of that could be addressed through suitable government policy. Maybe these companies just want it both ways. They can then brag about how safe their AI is, but blame the ignorant masses for it not actually being deployed.
  • coffeefirst 7y ago
    Yes, and to shrug off responsibility when something horrible happens. At this point the ignorant masses are pretty astute to see beneath the hype there’s a disturbing amount of reckless optimism.
• megablast 7y ago
  > While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. We seem to accept being killed by someone else, since that is how most of the 40,000 people are killed every single year in the US. I don't hear too many drivers complaining about that.
  • close04 7y ago
    I'd say it's also because today we instinctively know FSD cars have not proved their skills in the same conditions a human driver does every day. Racking up millions of miles by following a line or the car in front on the highway is far from dealing with a crowded city center, bad weather, unexpected issues that have no clear rules of engagement, etc. Tomorrow the situation will be different. But it's hard to trust such a broad safety claim knowing it's based on partial data and say "the failure rate [for self driving] is on average /better/". Comparing failure rates obtained is such different conditions is misleading. Self driving cars are like a student driver with supervision. They currently drive in relatively controlled environments, or at least ones with very forgiving conditions, and are learning. And just like student drivers with supervision they are relatively safe. Until the moment they're exposed to the full set of driving conditions without supervision. We intimately and instinctively know and trust how the learning process work in humans. For cars not so much. Not yet anyway.
  • nkrisc 7y ago
    > We seem to accept being killed by someone else, since that is how most of the 40,000 people are killed every single year in the US. I don't hear too many drivers complaining about that. As a driver, that's not really something you have control over, apart from driving defensively. Your AutoPilot Tesla can still get T-boned in an intersection by some guy running a red.
• andyidsinga 7y ago
  it seems the bar should be that high as that is what the hype has told us we would be getting. I'm OK with it being as good as the hype ...and when it isn't the companies that write the software and build the cars can pay for the damage
• stubish 7y ago
  I see a lot of talk about how society will not accept machines that might make mistakes, but I don't think society has actually had a chance to make its opinions known yet. Society isn't the noisy voices and the click bait headlines, it is people who mostly quickly adapted to elevators and lifts and planes and trains, all of which are vehicles that have killed people while operating autonomously. I expect you will find the same worries about them too if you trawl the newspaper archives.
  • cogman10 7y ago
    Yup, I'd say it is more that corporations aren't ready to take the legal risk of SDC. If I get into a car accident, my insurance company gets the fun job of litigating. Either I or the other driver will be found liable. If the car was driving, however, and it makes a mistake then the manufacturer could be held liable. And since car manufacturers have deep pockets, you can bet they'll get sued. This is why manufacturers are pursuing perfection. Not because of a moral obligation, rather, a financial one.
    • stubish 7y ago
      I wonder if the first true autonomous cars will be in Europe or somewhere less litigious, and not in Arizona as most people seem to be expecting. Maybe international European or interstate Australian trucking will be the first success (or not success... )
• nkrisc 7y ago
  Not only that, but it's the type of situations that will kill you in each case that make a difference too. From the various self-driving related death I've read about, most of them appeared to be situations that could have easily been avoided if a person had been driving and paying full attention. On the flip side, the kinds of situations that kill normal drivers are often ones that a self-driving car could trivially avoid. So with a self-driving car, you have the mental hurdle of asking people to accept the risk of the car killing them in a situation they could likely have avoided had they been driving, even if it is statistically less likely than them killing themselves while driving.
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Everyone said the first death via SDC would be a massive setback. After the Uber death in Arizona, have we seen that massive setback? I'd argue not, I think you are vastly over-estimating the risk aversion of the American public, which has allowed opioid epidemics, numerous pointless/corrupt foreign incursions, and allows the caging of children. Can we factually say we're a nation that highly values safety and human life? The delay is mostly due to a lack of suitable EV's and suitable tech. If big business was ready, big business would ram this through as soon as it could generate a good profit or good PR.
  • Steltek 7y ago
    There are a lot of reasons Arizona didn't register on the radar much. 1) Arizona pretty much invited this problem through publicly denying oversight or responsibility. This is more a problem for Arizonians than it is for self driving tech. If things were done above board, there would be more questions and concern. 2) Everyone is used to Ubers driving badly, nearly killing other people, and generally escaping the law. This wouldn't be tolerated from Waymo/Google. 3) Deceitful PR with the camera footage painted this as solely the pedestrian's fault and not an alarming sensor/software issue.