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I’m not sure what brightlines exist in society for when lives are on the line. Lives are already on the line for human driving, so what is the moral story one w

I’m not sure what brightlines exist in society for when lives are on the line. Lives are already on the line for human driving, so what is the moral story one would extract from the big picture of how people relate to driving today? The only story I see is politics and complexity, as opposed to moral clarity.

jacquesm 7y ago
It's quite simple, actually: a self driving vehicle should be a monotonous improvement on non-self driving. In other words, all situations that are currently handled by regular drivers should be handled just as well or better for self driving to be socially acceptable. A statistical argument based on a reduction of overall fatalities including a number of new kinds of accidents will not be accepted. People (and the media) are going to focus on the accidents that would not have happened if self driving did not exist.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- timerol 7y ago
  The problem with your statement is that some people view handling a situation better as getting more cars through a bottleneck in a certain amount of time, and other people view better as making sure that all humans in the area stay safe.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    PR will never be about throughput but it will always be about safety. You'll never read 'due to Tesla's self driving abilities we can now push 3% more cars across the bridge'. What you will read (on page one, complete with 'shocking' picture) is 'Self driving Tesla crashes into bridge support'.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      Which might mean that we are going to demand a safety level that's unattainable without decreasing throughput. In other words, human driving might be risky, but it's familiar, which apparently makes it tolerable.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  > a self driving vehicle should be a monotonous improvement on non-self driving. In other words, all situations that are currently handled by regular drivers should be handled just as well or better for self driving to be socially acceptable. I agree with this but I think it implies that people also will not accept safe self-driving cars that take forever to get anywhere in traffic. Especially since a decline in average traffic throughput makes things worse for everyone in a car, self-driving or not. I think this makes the problem much harder, since a lot of people do demonstrably take risks in their driving now, in the interest of saving time (even knowing intellectually that lives are on the line).
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Or, in the more optimistic case, SDV will come to areas where top speed is not a priority - think "bulk cargo".
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Yeah, the place where self-driving will make the biggest impact first, is for long-haul truck driving.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    If you slowed everyone’s traffic by 25%, how many human lives are wasted (though not ended) per year? If you assume people drive 10K per year at an average speed of 33 mph, you’re driving ~300 hours per year. Slow that by 25% and it’s an extra 100 hours per year. If you assume 7.5 hours of sleep, you’d spend an extra 1.6% of your waking life in a car because of the slowdown. That’s killing a lot of time, even if not directly killing people.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  The problem is that we might not ever get to monotonous improvement. We can probably easily get to a state where self-driving would decrease the number of traffic injuries and fatalities in total compared to human drivers. But machines make different mistakes, mistakes that humans would never do, and that's psychologically not acceptable to most people. All the actual accidents will be "freak" accidents that a human could never cause, and that scares people a lot more than "human" accidents like a drunk driver running someone over at a pedestrian crossing.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Yes, you got it perfectly. That's exactly my fear. And Tesla isn't helping with their marketing because they suggest we are further than we really are.
  - AareyBaba 7y ago
    Exactly. Accelerating and crashing into a barrier a human would easily avoid is not acceptable. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/02/13/ntsb-releases-report-on-2018-fatal-silicon-valley-tesla-autopilot-crash/#b46759e42a81 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/02/13/ntsb-r... It psychologically like being a passenger in a car with a good driver who has a history of epileptic seizures.
    - craftinator 7y ago
      Strange, because there are a LARGE number of driving fatalities caused by this exact behavior every year. The common explanations are: driver dozing or falling asleep, unexpected curve with poor visibility, driver mistaking the shoulder for another lane, and driver striking median to exit ramp by misjudging a lane change. Humans do all of these things, on a daily basis. So by human standards, accelerating and crashing into a barrier is quite commonplace.
  - coding123 7y ago
    That's exactly it. If I get killed by a drunk driver, my wife will at least have someone to rage at. If I get killed because my car randomly decides to drive itself into a high up truck and I basically died because of stupid technology. I would hope that it doesn't end up killing my wife too out of rage that she's going up against a major corporation now. That's kind of maddening.
- amelius 7y ago
  > A statistical argument based on a reduction of overall fatalities including a number of new kinds of accidents will not be accepted. I think what would be accepted is if the self-driving car would have capabilities that surpass the best human driver (as opposed to the "average" driver). But we're a long way from that.
  - ph0rque 7y ago
    That makes me wonder: who is verifiably the best human driver? I recall reading about a truck driver who went over a million miles without being in an accident. Probably someone like that?
    - amelius 7y ago
      Yes, difficult to answer, so I wasn't thinking of an actual person (similarly to how the average driver doesn't exist as a person). If you want to imagine someone, then perhaps the person who drives the president?
      - Piskvorrr 7y ago
        That's a very different skillset from a normal driver; in fact, I think that in driving The Beast aka Stagecoach, road safety is an afterthought to a host of tactical considerations: the goal not being "safe driving", but "keep the President safe, to the exclusion of anything else." With 4 MPG, this is a plainclothes APC, not a normal car ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_state_car_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_state_car_(United...

jacquesm 7y ago

It's quite simple, actually: a self driving vehicle should be a monotonous improvement on non-self driving. In other words, all situations that are currently handled by regular drivers should be handled just as well or better for self driving to be socially acceptable. A statistical argument based on a reduction of overall fatalities including a number of new kinds of accidents will not be accepted. People (and the media) are going to focus on the accidents that would not have happened if self driving did not exist.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
timerol 7y ago
The problem with your statement is that some people view handling a situation better as getting more cars through a bottleneck in a certain amount of time, and other people view better as making sure that all humans in the area stay safe.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  PR will never be about throughput but it will always be about safety. You'll never read 'due to Tesla's self driving abilities we can now push 3% more cars across the bridge'. What you will read (on page one, complete with 'shocking' picture) is 'Self driving Tesla crashes into bridge support'.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Which might mean that we are going to demand a safety level that's unattainable without decreasing throughput. In other words, human driving might be risky, but it's familiar, which apparently makes it tolerable.
snowwrestler 7y ago
> a self driving vehicle should be a monotonous improvement on non-self driving. In other words, all situations that are currently handled by regular drivers should be handled just as well or better for self driving to be socially acceptable. I agree with this but I think it implies that people also will not accept safe self-driving cars that take forever to get anywhere in traffic. Especially since a decline in average traffic throughput makes things worse for everyone in a car, self-driving or not. I think this makes the problem much harder, since a lot of people do demonstrably take risks in their driving now, in the interest of saving time (even knowing intellectually that lives are on the line).
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Or, in the more optimistic case, SDV will come to areas where top speed is not a priority - think "bulk cargo".
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Yeah, the place where self-driving will make the biggest impact first, is for long-haul truck driving.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  If you slowed everyone’s traffic by 25%, how many human lives are wasted (though not ended) per year? If you assume people drive 10K per year at an average speed of 33 mph, you’re driving ~300 hours per year. Slow that by 25% and it’s an extra 100 hours per year. If you assume 7.5 hours of sleep, you’d spend an extra 1.6% of your waking life in a car because of the slowdown. That’s killing a lot of time, even if not directly killing people.
henrikschroder 7y ago
The problem is that we might not ever get to monotonous improvement. We can probably easily get to a state where self-driving would decrease the number of traffic injuries and fatalities in total compared to human drivers. But machines make different mistakes, mistakes that humans would never do, and that's psychologically not acceptable to most people. All the actual accidents will be "freak" accidents that a human could never cause, and that scares people a lot more than "human" accidents like a drunk driver running someone over at a pedestrian crossing.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Yes, you got it perfectly. That's exactly my fear. And Tesla isn't helping with their marketing because they suggest we are further than we really are.
- AareyBaba 7y ago
  Exactly. Accelerating and crashing into a barrier a human would easily avoid is not acceptable. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/02/13/ntsb-releases-report-on-2018-fatal-silicon-valley-tesla-autopilot-crash/#b46759e42a81 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/02/13/ntsb-r... It psychologically like being a passenger in a car with a good driver who has a history of epileptic seizures.
  - craftinator 7y ago
    Strange, because there are a LARGE number of driving fatalities caused by this exact behavior every year. The common explanations are: driver dozing or falling asleep, unexpected curve with poor visibility, driver mistaking the shoulder for another lane, and driver striking median to exit ramp by misjudging a lane change. Humans do all of these things, on a daily basis. So by human standards, accelerating and crashing into a barrier is quite commonplace.
- coding123 7y ago
  That's exactly it. If I get killed by a drunk driver, my wife will at least have someone to rage at. If I get killed because my car randomly decides to drive itself into a high up truck and I basically died because of stupid technology. I would hope that it doesn't end up killing my wife too out of rage that she's going up against a major corporation now. That's kind of maddening.
amelius 7y ago
> A statistical argument based on a reduction of overall fatalities including a number of new kinds of accidents will not be accepted. I think what would be accepted is if the self-driving car would have capabilities that surpass the best human driver (as opposed to the "average" driver). But we're a long way from that.
- ph0rque 7y ago
  That makes me wonder: who is verifiably the best human driver? I recall reading about a truck driver who went over a million miles without being in an accident. Probably someone like that?
  - amelius 7y ago
    Yes, difficult to answer, so I wasn't thinking of an actual person (similarly to how the average driver doesn't exist as a person). If you want to imagine someone, then perhaps the person who drives the president?
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      That's a very different skillset from a normal driver; in fact, I think that in driving The Beast aka Stagecoach, road safety is an afterthought to a host of tactical considerations: the goal not being "safe driving", but "keep the President safe, to the exclusion of anything else." With 4 MPG, this is a plainclothes APC, not a normal car ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_state_car_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_state_car_(United...