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> mind boggling to think people trust this crap It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in

> mind boggling to think people trust this crap It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals. And yet we do, and as a result, horrendous catastrophes occur every minute of every day. > It's all fancy neural networks until someone dies No, that can't be the standard, not when people are dying right now in the current regime. Unless the new regime kills and maims at a higher rate than the current regime, there is no reason for fear.

perl4ever 7y ago
"It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals." The appropriate standard for self-driving cars is a sober professional driver, not the average idiot on Saturday night. It isn't unusual for a driver to go a million miles without an accident, when that's their job.
- ajross 7y ago
  No, the appropriate standard for a self-driving car is the driver they replace. If they're safer than whoever would have been driving (be it on a saturday night or not) then they're a net win. Right now the average idiots are buying more Teslas than mail carriers and cab drivers, though that might change I guess. Numbers are numbers.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    A Tesla owner could ride in a cab or on a bus, though. On average, it seems like without a Tesla they would be at least minimally more likely to. You seem to be implying that cab drivers are the only people who ride in cabs.
  - ars 7y ago
    If you like numbers, then you'll like this one: Humans achieve 7 9's of reliability when driving a car, as measured for fatalities by time, or 8 9's if you measure by miles. I've yet to see a computer just stay up that long, never mind actually doing anything the whole time. (If you use the collision rate instead, the numbers are about 500 times worse - but that's still quite a lot of 9's.) People have this fixed thought that humans are terrible drives. They are not! Computers have their work cut out for them to exceed the reliability record humans have set.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      You are using the 9s term wrong. It is supposed to be used with unitless numbers. Not crashes per hour or per mile. Silly example of why: humans are zero nines of reliability if you talk about crashes per parsec.
      - ars 7y ago
        > Not crashes per hour or per mile. But that's not what I measured. I measured safe minutes of driving as a ratio to unsafe minutes. Which is a unitless number. For 7 9's I assumed a crash had a 5 minute lead-in of unsafe driving before the actual crash, and that average driving speed was 30 mph. If you assume the bad driving is 30 seconds (for example the accident in Tuscon the Uber car saw the pedestrian around 30 seconds before crashing), then you can add another 9, making both figures 8 9's of reliability.
        aidenn0 7y ago
        Thanks for the clarification. I haven't checked your numbers but they seem reasonable. FWIW, I think deaths, regardless of fault, is probably the best number for an apples-to-apples comparison. If the Uber car were driven by a person without a dash-cam, then there is no way they would have been ruled at fault. Similarly, I have been involved in 5 collisions (most were not my fault). Of the 5, 3 were reported to insurance and only 1 was recorded by the police (For 1 other the police were called, but the dispatcher (on the non-emergency police line) said "Are both cars driveable? (yes) Is anyone injured? (No), then don't bother us!" (By comparison, in California even a single car collision on private property must, in theory, be reported to the police). Deaths, at least, will get recorded by the CDC, if nobody else. [edit] However, I don't think that deaths are necessarily the best number for considering "failures" all deaths are in some way a failure, but most failures do not result in deaths. Nobody even had to see a doctor for the 5 collisions I mention. I've fallen asleep at the wheel and crossed the center-line without getting in an accident, &c. humans make a lot of mistakes, but most of them do not result in a collision, and most of the ones that result in a collision do not result in a death. I also think it's inevitable that computers will become better at driving than not just the mean or median driver, but 90th percentile or more, at which point it would be immoral to not, in some way, encourage self-driving cars over human-driven cars. My guess is that we are less than a decade away from that point, but I could be wrong. Certainly the lack of a safety-culture in the automotive field (as compared to say, avionics) is a huge barrier to be overcome, and that's a social hurdle, not a technical one and I can only make wild-ass guesses as to when that will change.
thebruce87m 7y ago
No, it needs to be a lower rate since it will kill at random. Today’s rate includes drunk drivers, people on their phone and other “unsafe” drivers. If you are an attentive driver your chance of death would actually go up if the overall death rate was the same.
- marvin 7y ago
  Thankfully, using these features is optional.
- slim 7y ago
  if you are an attentive driver you can get killed anytime by these other drivers
  - thebruce87m 7y ago
    I’m maybe missing your point, but this is reflected in the overall death rate now. Similarly in the future the overall death rate will include deaths of the occupants of self-driving cars and also the cars/people that they hit. The perception will be different however, since in the public eye the drunk driver “had it coming” and the only real loss is the other driver/passengers/pedestrians. If a self-driving car kills its own occupants and the occupants of another car then there are more “innocents” than in the drunk-drive scenario.
semi-extrinsic 7y ago
To really be a measurable improvement over humans, and especially an improvement that is statistically distinguishable from just letting the safety tech of 2019 percolate into the average car, self-driving needs to achieve fatality rates around 0.1 per billion miles. Current averages for the US are around 10 per billion miles and decreasing; best countries in Europe are already below 5 per billion miles. There's some really interesting progress both on vehicles monitoring driver attention, and on monitoring for alcohol in the air, that would yield substantial improvements even beyond 2019 tech. I have no doubt we'll see fatality rates below 1 per billion miles in Western Europe within a decade. The corollary of the statistics quoted above is that you need to observe your self-driving vehicle system over tens of billions of miles before you even know if you're safer or not.
- tim333 7y ago
  I'd quibble with your stats that self driving has to be 100x better than human to be a measurable improvement. You can estimate fairly well if a human driver is safe or not from a few hours as a passenger by seeing if they notice everything and if they have near misses. Also it's not to hard on published data to see the Tesla autopilot seems a fair bit worse than humans under the same conditions. I imagine they will improve.
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    I'm not saying it has to be 100x better than a human. What I'm saying is, the averages today are across all vehicles on the road, some of which are old and have fairly low survival probability in an accident. And the deployment of technology to handle/avoid distracted driving is still in its infancy. If we just wait 10-15 years, I believe the safety rates for humans will increase by 10x over current US statistics. Then self-driving has to manage another 10x improvement over that, in order to be worth it.

perl4ever 7y ago

"It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals." The appropriate standard for self-driving cars is a sober professional driver, not the average idiot on Saturday night. It isn't unusual for a driver to go a million miles without an accident, when that's their job.

ajross 7y ago
No, the appropriate standard for a self-driving car is the driver they replace. If they're safer than whoever would have been driving (be it on a saturday night or not) then they're a net win. Right now the average idiots are buying more Teslas than mail carriers and cab drivers, though that might change I guess. Numbers are numbers.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  A Tesla owner could ride in a cab or on a bus, though. On average, it seems like without a Tesla they would be at least minimally more likely to. You seem to be implying that cab drivers are the only people who ride in cabs.
- ars 7y ago
  If you like numbers, then you'll like this one: Humans achieve 7 9's of reliability when driving a car, as measured for fatalities by time, or 8 9's if you measure by miles. I've yet to see a computer just stay up that long, never mind actually doing anything the whole time. (If you use the collision rate instead, the numbers are about 500 times worse - but that's still quite a lot of 9's.) People have this fixed thought that humans are terrible drives. They are not! Computers have their work cut out for them to exceed the reliability record humans have set.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    You are using the 9s term wrong. It is supposed to be used with unitless numbers. Not crashes per hour or per mile. Silly example of why: humans are zero nines of reliability if you talk about crashes per parsec.
    - ars 7y ago
      > Not crashes per hour or per mile. But that's not what I measured. I measured safe minutes of driving as a ratio to unsafe minutes. Which is a unitless number. For 7 9's I assumed a crash had a 5 minute lead-in of unsafe driving before the actual crash, and that average driving speed was 30 mph. If you assume the bad driving is 30 seconds (for example the accident in Tuscon the Uber car saw the pedestrian around 30 seconds before crashing), then you can add another 9, making both figures 8 9's of reliability.
      - aidenn0 7y ago
        Thanks for the clarification. I haven't checked your numbers but they seem reasonable. FWIW, I think deaths, regardless of fault, is probably the best number for an apples-to-apples comparison. If the Uber car were driven by a person without a dash-cam, then there is no way they would have been ruled at fault. Similarly, I have been involved in 5 collisions (most were not my fault). Of the 5, 3 were reported to insurance and only 1 was recorded by the police (For 1 other the police were called, but the dispatcher (on the non-emergency police line) said "Are both cars driveable? (yes) Is anyone injured? (No), then don't bother us!" (By comparison, in California even a single car collision on private property must, in theory, be reported to the police). Deaths, at least, will get recorded by the CDC, if nobody else. [edit] However, I don't think that deaths are necessarily the best number for considering "failures" all deaths are in some way a failure, but most failures do not result in deaths. Nobody even had to see a doctor for the 5 collisions I mention. I've fallen asleep at the wheel and crossed the center-line without getting in an accident, &c. humans make a lot of mistakes, but most of them do not result in a collision, and most of the ones that result in a collision do not result in a death. I also think it's inevitable that computers will become better at driving than not just the mean or median driver, but 90th percentile or more, at which point it would be immoral to not, in some way, encourage self-driving cars over human-driven cars. My guess is that we are less than a decade away from that point, but I could be wrong. Certainly the lack of a safety-culture in the automotive field (as compared to say, avionics) is a huge barrier to be overcome, and that's a social hurdle, not a technical one and I can only make wild-ass guesses as to when that will change.

thebruce87m 7y ago

No, it needs to be a lower rate since it will kill at random. Today’s rate includes drunk drivers, people on their phone and other “unsafe” drivers. If you are an attentive driver your chance of death would actually go up if the overall death rate was the same.

marvin 7y ago
Thankfully, using these features is optional.
slim 7y ago
if you are an attentive driver you can get killed anytime by these other drivers
- thebruce87m 7y ago
  I’m maybe missing your point, but this is reflected in the overall death rate now. Similarly in the future the overall death rate will include deaths of the occupants of self-driving cars and also the cars/people that they hit. The perception will be different however, since in the public eye the drunk driver “had it coming” and the only real loss is the other driver/passengers/pedestrians. If a self-driving car kills its own occupants and the occupants of another car then there are more “innocents” than in the drunk-drive scenario.

semi-extrinsic 7y ago

To really be a measurable improvement over humans, and especially an improvement that is statistically distinguishable from just letting the safety tech of 2019 percolate into the average car, self-driving needs to achieve fatality rates around 0.1 per billion miles. Current averages for the US are around 10 per billion miles and decreasing; best countries in Europe are already below 5 per billion miles. There's some really interesting progress both on vehicles monitoring driver attention, and on monitoring for alcohol in the air, that would yield substantial improvements even beyond 2019 tech. I have no doubt we'll see fatality rates below 1 per billion miles in Western Europe within a decade. The corollary of the statistics quoted above is that you need to observe your self-driving vehicle system over tens of billions of miles before you even know if you're safer or not.

tim333 7y ago
I'd quibble with your stats that self driving has to be 100x better than human to be a measurable improvement. You can estimate fairly well if a human driver is safe or not from a few hours as a passenger by seeing if they notice everything and if they have near misses. Also it's not to hard on published data to see the Tesla autopilot seems a fair bit worse than humans under the same conditions. I imagine they will improve.
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  I'm not saying it has to be 100x better than a human. What I'm saying is, the averages today are across all vehicles on the road, some of which are old and have fairly low survival probability in an accident. And the deployment of technology to handle/avoid distracted driving is still in its infancy. If we just wait 10-15 years, I believe the safety rates for humans will increase by 10x over current US statistics. Then self-driving has to manage another 10x improvement over that, in order to be worth it.