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Hah, if the main barrier to autopilot for cars is liability and insurance, passive biometric monitoring of the driver is certainly one way to shift liability ar

Hah, if the main barrier to autopilot for cars is liability and insurance, passive biometric monitoring of the driver is certainly one way to shift liability around. The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. The real problem is "free" auto pilot means people will use it often enough to make a catastrophe an actuarial inevitability, whereas if they have to pay to text while driving on autopilot, they're going to do it less, and live long enough to be killed by something else.

lm28469 6y ago
> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > No amount of money makes up for human lives Sure, but no human life is worth spending infinite resources to protect.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lm28469 6y ago
    There is no need to spend infinite resources. Look at the driver facing camera when the accident occurs. Either the driver was paying attention or he was doing something else. It's a legal issue, not a technical issue.
  - thedrbrian 6y ago
    You obviously aren’t a part of the government coronavirus response
- Gys 6y ago
  > No amount of money makes up for human lives. In that case we should not allow cars driven by humans either?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  > No amount of money makes up for human lives Trivially untrue since you can save one life for under $1000 but almost everyone with $1000 will keep it rather than save the life - revealing that $1000 is worth more than an arbitrary human life.
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    That is not an example of $1000 "making up" for human life, though.
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    Just out of curiosity, how do I save one life for $1000?
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Givewell has a model for you: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BmFwVYeGMkpys6hG0tnfHyq__ZFZf-bmXYLSHODGpLY/edit#gid=1377543212 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BmFwVYeGMkpys6hG0tnf... They have more detailed information elsewhere. They are generally trustworthy. Of course I boosted the cost (based on memory) a little, and literalized the value (the truth is that each additional mosquito net has a marginal reduction in the probability of a child contracting and then dying of malaria). And it looks like I made two errors: * I had a memory of an older model - the newer one makes it more expensive * I misremembered the optimal strategy (it isn't anti-malaria, it's Deworm the World at $1003 / child under age 5 saved).
- cortesoft 6y ago
  > No amount of money makes up for human lives. You clearly don't actually believe that, or there are a ton of activities you would stop doing. You wouldn't drive to work, because there is a chance you might kill someone while driving, and you only go to work for money, so why do it?
- hnracer 6y ago
  We should delineate between resources (which has a fiat value) and fiat money. I agree that fiat money can't make up for a human life, since if money is destroyed, the remaining money supply increases in value through deflation and no actual resources are destroyed. However I disagree that a human life can't be equated with resources. Would you destroy $10 billion of value/resources in the economy to save 1 person? I don't think that's worth it, because that $10 billion of value could've been food and medicine which can save thousands of people. This is really just the trolley problem. But the bigger you make the sum (if you don't agree at $10 billion, what about $1 trillion?), at some extreme point you're going to have to say "ok, one life isn't worth that much."
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > Would you destroy $10 billion of value/resources in the economy to save 1 person? You can spin any arguments by framing them in such ridiculous scenarios. My comment is obviously in the context of people able to pay money to get rid of their personal responsibilities.
    - hnracer 6y ago
      I was just demonstrating the absurdity of your comment. Taking things to the limit to demonstrate the absurdity of absolutist statements like the one you made is a perfectly acceptable thing to do and is not "spin". You said "no amount of money" and I took that at face value. If that's not what you meant then that's fine, there's no disagreement between us. From reading the many other replies to your comment, everyone else was left with the same impression by what you said.
      - tripzilch 6y ago
        It's quite simple. If you drive into a family, killing them, you will realise, as the brains are dripping down your window, that the insurance premium you paid, actually only affects the opinion of people who have literally no idea what you just did.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative This is a metric human drivers fail to hit every single day. There is some acceptable level of risk in shifting driving to a robot. How you draw that comparison and draw the line is tough. It's complicated greatly because the kinds of failures autopilot makes are significantly different from the kinds of failures humans make.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > This is a metric human drivers fail to hit every single day. Yes exactly, and when they fuck up they suffer the consequences. Which if you were reckless will most likely be years in prison. You shouldn't be able to get away by paying money which is what the comment I replied to asks for.
    - sellyme 6y ago
      You're not "getting away" with anything. You're paying someone else to do a job, and that other person writes software to do the job. They're the ones responsible for the software at that stage.
      - tripzilch 6y ago
        You can't "pay away" your responsibility for human lives like that. You can point towards the anomymous software engineer you supposedly paid off your responsibility to. But you're still the one that literally killed a family. You'll realise there are some things you can't transfer responsibility from, when you're sitting behind the brains dripping off your window. But at least all the people who have literally zero idea what you just went through, will tell you it's really Tesla's fault who wrote the software and they're responsible really. And there's no amount of money you can pay, to make you believe them.
    - iso947 6y ago
      30,000 plus people are killed on American roads every year. Drivers killed more people in September 2001 than terrorists. How many end up in jail?
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
You mean that you'd have the choice between using autopilot as is (with you having the liability, not allowed to text) or switch to Tesla having the liability and be free to text? That would require the system to be safe enough to text while using it. If you mean that the feature should always be pay-to-use, that seems ridiculous. Why try to minimize the use of a driver assist feature?
- motohagiography 6y ago
  A car you can drive drunk is the only meaningful definition of a self-driving car, imo. I mean both, and specifically that driver assist should be pay to use to offset usage because it is likely higher net risk for a collision than a human. Free driver-assist has a "tragedy of the commons" problem, or a moral hazard, where there is no cost to over-using it and courting a collision event, so this overall risk can be reduced by metering its use. Also, yes, the system should be safe enough to text while using it. That's what "self driving car" should mean. Another criteria would be that a person should be able to use it with a blood alcohol level higher than is legal today as well, and that it absolves people of an "impaired driving" charge. There is a division between driver assist and full autonomous self driving, but these are features that could be pay per use based on relative actuarial risk. To people who say you can't put a price on human life, clearly you do not have auto insurance?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > A car you can drive drunk is the only meaningful definition of a self-driving car, imo. That's kind of a messy definition. A drunk person might start messing with the controls, and a car that is perfectly able to drive itself might not be able to handle that. You could fix that with a breathalyzer but it would be ridiculous if the difference between self-driving and not-self-driving is the presence of a breathalyzer. So I would say something more like "drive from the passenger seat" or "drive while asleep".
    - hvidgaard 6y ago
      Drive from A to B without any person in the car then.
mannykannot 6y ago
Hm... are you suggesting that Tesla's motivation here might be to develop a logging system to defend itself against liability claims by demonstrating that the driver was not paying attention, as opposed to a system to take measures at the time to prevent the crash? I would regard doing the former, while not the latter, to be deeply unethical, as, at least in my book, motive matters. I am not saying thet I expect Tesla to do so, but it is possible that the incentives could be to do just that: for example, if it turns out to be impractical to produce an effective warning and intervention system that is not regarded as too intrusive by its customers. Don't take that route, Tesla. Nothing but either true (not necessarily perfect) self-driving, or effective monitoring and intervention, is acceptable.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  > I am not saying thet I expect Tesla to do so Why? Did they suddenly engineer themselves into a new type of corporation that doesn't drop its ethics at the first opportunity? I have nothing specifically against Tesla, but I fully expect them to simply do whatever if they are incentivised by the right profit structure. The "best" corporations have disappointed me in this manner, no shame on Tesla for existing, but that is what it will do, given the chance. "Tesla" is not your human friend that you can talk to or appease in the hope that it won't do what is its nature. Talking into the void won't tame it.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Not really, the system primarily exists for two reasons: 1) in case future regulation requires "monitoring if the driver is paying attention to the road" and 2) for their robo-taxi service that might or might not come out within the next 5 years as Elon says (hint: it will not) I own a Tesla and would love if this internal camera were to be available to Sentry mode/saved with dashcam footage (for insurance reasons, internal dashcams are great for strengthening the driver's case), but that's not possible currently.
gfody 6y ago
> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. well this seems inevitable now - the amount you pay out of pocket for body damage repairs depending on the machinations of high-speed-trading algorithms acting on the sensor data streaming out of your car. not just the price of autopilot fluctuates but every non-essential function distracting enough to influence the actuarial tables. want to listen to music? in this traffic? too expensive!

lm28469 6y ago

> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> No amount of money makes up for human lives Sure, but no human life is worth spending infinite resources to protect.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lm28469 6y ago
  There is no need to spend infinite resources. Look at the driver facing camera when the accident occurs. Either the driver was paying attention or he was doing something else. It's a legal issue, not a technical issue.
- thedrbrian 6y ago
  You obviously aren’t a part of the government coronavirus response
Gys 6y ago
> No amount of money makes up for human lives. In that case we should not allow cars driven by humans either?
renewiltord 6y ago
> No amount of money makes up for human lives Trivially untrue since you can save one life for under $1000 but almost everyone with $1000 will keep it rather than save the life - revealing that $1000 is worth more than an arbitrary human life.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  That is not an example of $1000 "making up" for human life, though.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  Just out of curiosity, how do I save one life for $1000?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Givewell has a model for you: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BmFwVYeGMkpys6hG0tnfHyq__ZFZf-bmXYLSHODGpLY/edit#gid=1377543212 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BmFwVYeGMkpys6hG0tnf... They have more detailed information elsewhere. They are generally trustworthy. Of course I boosted the cost (based on memory) a little, and literalized the value (the truth is that each additional mosquito net has a marginal reduction in the probability of a child contracting and then dying of malaria). And it looks like I made two errors: * I had a memory of an older model - the newer one makes it more expensive * I misremembered the optimal strategy (it isn't anti-malaria, it's Deworm the World at $1003 / child under age 5 saved).
cortesoft 6y ago
> No amount of money makes up for human lives. You clearly don't actually believe that, or there are a ton of activities you would stop doing. You wouldn't drive to work, because there is a chance you might kill someone while driving, and you only go to work for money, so why do it?
hnracer 6y ago
We should delineate between resources (which has a fiat value) and fiat money. I agree that fiat money can't make up for a human life, since if money is destroyed, the remaining money supply increases in value through deflation and no actual resources are destroyed. However I disagree that a human life can't be equated with resources. Would you destroy $10 billion of value/resources in the economy to save 1 person? I don't think that's worth it, because that $10 billion of value could've been food and medicine which can save thousands of people. This is really just the trolley problem. But the bigger you make the sum (if you don't agree at $10 billion, what about $1 trillion?), at some extreme point you're going to have to say "ok, one life isn't worth that much."
- lm28469 6y ago
  > Would you destroy $10 billion of value/resources in the economy to save 1 person? You can spin any arguments by framing them in such ridiculous scenarios. My comment is obviously in the context of people able to pay money to get rid of their personal responsibilities.
  - hnracer 6y ago
    I was just demonstrating the absurdity of your comment. Taking things to the limit to demonstrate the absurdity of absolutist statements like the one you made is a perfectly acceptable thing to do and is not "spin". You said "no amount of money" and I took that at face value. If that's not what you meant then that's fine, there's no disagreement between us. From reading the many other replies to your comment, everyone else was left with the same impression by what you said.
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      It's quite simple. If you drive into a family, killing them, you will realise, as the brains are dripping down your window, that the insurance premium you paid, actually only affects the opinion of people who have literally no idea what you just did.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
ogre_codes 6y ago
> No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative This is a metric human drivers fail to hit every single day. There is some acceptable level of risk in shifting driving to a robot. How you draw that comparison and draw the line is tough. It's complicated greatly because the kinds of failures autopilot makes are significantly different from the kinds of failures humans make.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > This is a metric human drivers fail to hit every single day. Yes exactly, and when they fuck up they suffer the consequences. Which if you were reckless will most likely be years in prison. You shouldn't be able to get away by paying money which is what the comment I replied to asks for.
  - sellyme 6y ago
    You're not "getting away" with anything. You're paying someone else to do a job, and that other person writes software to do the job. They're the ones responsible for the software at that stage.
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      You can't "pay away" your responsibility for human lives like that. You can point towards the anomymous software engineer you supposedly paid off your responsibility to. But you're still the one that literally killed a family. You'll realise there are some things you can't transfer responsibility from, when you're sitting behind the brains dripping off your window. But at least all the people who have literally zero idea what you just went through, will tell you it's really Tesla's fault who wrote the software and they're responsible really. And there's no amount of money you can pay, to make you believe them.
  - iso947 6y ago
    30,000 plus people are killed on American roads every year. Drivers killed more people in September 2001 than terrorists. How many end up in jail?

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

You mean that you'd have the choice between using autopilot as is (with you having the liability, not allowed to text) or switch to Tesla having the liability and be free to text? That would require the system to be safe enough to text while using it. If you mean that the feature should always be pay-to-use, that seems ridiculous. Why try to minimize the use of a driver assist feature?

motohagiography 6y ago
A car you can drive drunk is the only meaningful definition of a self-driving car, imo. I mean both, and specifically that driver assist should be pay to use to offset usage because it is likely higher net risk for a collision than a human. Free driver-assist has a "tragedy of the commons" problem, or a moral hazard, where there is no cost to over-using it and courting a collision event, so this overall risk can be reduced by metering its use. Also, yes, the system should be safe enough to text while using it. That's what "self driving car" should mean. Another criteria would be that a person should be able to use it with a blood alcohol level higher than is legal today as well, and that it absolves people of an "impaired driving" charge. There is a division between driver assist and full autonomous self driving, but these are features that could be pay per use based on relative actuarial risk. To people who say you can't put a price on human life, clearly you do not have auto insurance?
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > A car you can drive drunk is the only meaningful definition of a self-driving car, imo. That's kind of a messy definition. A drunk person might start messing with the controls, and a car that is perfectly able to drive itself might not be able to handle that. You could fix that with a breathalyzer but it would be ridiculous if the difference between self-driving and not-self-driving is the presence of a breathalyzer. So I would say something more like "drive from the passenger seat" or "drive while asleep".
  - hvidgaard 6y ago
    Drive from A to B without any person in the car then.

mannykannot 6y ago

Hm... are you suggesting that Tesla's motivation here might be to develop a logging system to defend itself against liability claims by demonstrating that the driver was not paying attention, as opposed to a system to take measures at the time to prevent the crash? I would regard doing the former, while not the latter, to be deeply unethical, as, at least in my book, motive matters. I am not saying thet I expect Tesla to do so, but it is possible that the incentives could be to do just that: for example, if it turns out to be impractical to produce an effective warning and intervention system that is not regarded as too intrusive by its customers. Don't take that route, Tesla. Nothing but either true (not necessarily perfect) self-driving, or effective monitoring and intervention, is acceptable.

tripzilch 6y ago
> I am not saying thet I expect Tesla to do so Why? Did they suddenly engineer themselves into a new type of corporation that doesn't drop its ethics at the first opportunity? I have nothing specifically against Tesla, but I fully expect them to simply do whatever if they are incentivised by the right profit structure. The "best" corporations have disappointed me in this manner, no shame on Tesla for existing, but that is what it will do, given the chance. "Tesla" is not your human friend that you can talk to or appease in the hope that it won't do what is its nature. Talking into the void won't tame it.
judge2020 6y ago
Not really, the system primarily exists for two reasons: 1) in case future regulation requires "monitoring if the driver is paying attention to the road" and 2) for their robo-taxi service that might or might not come out within the next 5 years as Elon says (hint: it will not) I own a Tesla and would love if this internal camera were to be available to Sentry mode/saved with dashcam footage (for insurance reasons, internal dashcams are great for strengthening the driver's case), but that's not possible currently.

gfody 6y ago

> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. well this seems inevitable now - the amount you pay out of pocket for body damage repairs depending on the machinations of high-speed-trading algorithms acting on the sensor data streaming out of your car. not just the price of autopilot fluctuates but every non-essential function distracting enough to influence the actuarial tables. want to listen to music? in this traffic? too expensive!