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There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now t

There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now it is literally standard-fit. There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more automation into cars as the years go by - you can guarantee that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives, we’d implement these measures today rather than banking on a long term tech solution. I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density, car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it. Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost half a century! The truth is we can fix all of these things right now, but it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is already benefitting. So instead we’ve made up a fantasy world where we can have our cake and eat it too.
- mattlondon 6y ago
  A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Obviously cars and pedestrians should be separated, but you are dramatically understating the impact speed has on pedestrian survival rates. At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a 20mph crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at 30mph, and 45mph being a 50/50 chance for most of the population. The effect is that slowing cars down from 35mph to 20mph in areas where pedestrians are close to cars could potentially double the chance of a pedestrian surviving a crash. And that’s not even accounting for how much less likely a collision is to happen at 20mph than 35mph. Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds Edit: of course, we can and should add more tech to make cars safer. That’s why backup cameras and seat belts are mandatory, and that’s a good thing. But as an argument for self driving cars, I think that they really come up short when there are tons of effective strategies available right now that we aren’t applying. And that’s my point.
    - jdxcode 6y ago
      that makes sense given kinetic energy is mass * velocity^2. That squaring of velocity means every mph as they get higher is even more significant than the ones before.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. what?
gbin 6y ago
There is also the value of your time back when you travel.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives, we’d implement these measures today rather than banking on a long term tech solution. I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density, car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it. Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost half a century! The truth is we can fix all of these things right now, but it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is already benefitting. So instead we’ve made up a fantasy world where we can have our cake and eat it too.

mattlondon 6y ago
A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Obviously cars and pedestrians should be separated, but you are dramatically understating the impact speed has on pedestrian survival rates. At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a 20mph crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at 30mph, and 45mph being a 50/50 chance for most of the population. The effect is that slowing cars down from 35mph to 20mph in areas where pedestrians are close to cars could potentially double the chance of a pedestrian surviving a crash. And that’s not even accounting for how much less likely a collision is to happen at 20mph than 35mph. Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds Edit: of course, we can and should add more tech to make cars safer. That’s why backup cameras and seat belts are mandatory, and that’s a good thing. But as an argument for self driving cars, I think that they really come up short when there are tons of effective strategies available right now that we aren’t applying. And that’s my point.
  - jdxcode 6y ago
    that makes sense given kinetic energy is mass * velocity^2. That squaring of velocity means every mph as they get higher is even more significant than the ones before.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. what?

gbin 6y ago

There is also the value of your time back when you travel.