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The ethics here are not as simple as "don't ship any self-driving AI until you are 100% sure they will never make a fatal mistake." There is no such thing as 1
by deweller 7y ago
The ethics here are not as simple as "don't ship any self-driving AI until you are 100% sure they will never make a fatal mistake." There is no such thing as 100% assurance in this field.
If you are so cautious that you never ship any self-driving code, there are lives that may be lost due to accidents caused by human failure. These accidents might have been avoided if an AI was at the wheel.
I respect this type of work is not for all people. I applaud the brave companies plowing ahead.
- majormjr 7y agoThere is a difference between 99% and 99.99% assurance in this field though. You can test your self-driving AI to a reasonably high degree of certainty before ever testing in a public uncontrolled environment.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoI've argued in several of these threads on self-driving the following point: safety in terms of fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled (VMT) is already in the single-digit range in Europe, and likely far below 1 fatality per billion VMT when restricted to "highways AND modern cars AND good conditions". So you need ridiculously huge samples to get statistically significant data on the safety of a single manufacturer's system. As in the order of magnitude of a hundred thousand miles per car for every one of the ~ 900k Teslas sold so far. Thus you reach a paradox: with current trends in "normal" car safety improvement, you won't know for sure if a particular self-driving model is safer than non-self-driving models until they are close to end-of-life. And then it's a bit late to find out.