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I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths,

I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So in this environment we can very soon be stuck in an uncanny valley where self-driving cars would already be a net positive in reducing road fatalities but at a level that is still generally considered unacceptable.

ImprobableTruth 6y ago
I think what further compounds this is that normally responsibility for accidents is 'distributed' across the population. whereas with autonomous driving it's going to be a single/a few companies shouldering it all. Being even responsible even just for 10% of total road fatalities (~4000 deaths per year) would be absolutely ruinous if they're held liable for them.
- ghaff 6y ago
  There's (arguably) the limited exception of pharmaceuticals--and, even there, there's a government fund to handle people who get sick or die because of vaccines. But it's hard to otherwise identify products used by consumers that, when maintained and used properly, sometimes randomly kill people and we shrug our shoulders and say "Stuff happens. Still a net benefit to society." We certainly don't do it today in the case of manufacturing or design defects in vehicles.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Responsibility for accidents is concentrated in insurance companies. Nothing substantial will change.
barnacled 6y ago
I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers. Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might be better but that doesn't fully paint a picture of what those numbers would look like. I also think the 'will randomly kill people, but rarely' aspect of self-driving cars will be majorly off-putting on a very human level. And finally there's a perception issue here - the self-driving hype is around the idea that the car is effectively being driven by a far better driver than a human, the second it turns out it does really crazy things sometimes (doesn't even have to involve fatalities necessarily) is also going to put people off I think. I personally prefer the idea of driver assists (responsibly developed so drivers aren't just distracted) aiding driver safety while we work on a supplemental self-driving solution, or perhaps as discussed in the article create some infrastructure along roads to make things more certain. I am far from being against self-driving cars, I just feel the timeline is longer than currently hyped.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  I agree completely. My take from the situation is much more that we are far far too lenient with our standards for cars, roads, and particularly drivers. We've set the bar so low that the technology has a good chance of clearing it soon but only serve to reveal how actually uncomfortable we are with such a low bar that we've normalized over time.
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    In many parts of North America you cannot function in society without a license. Therefore, we have sympathy for people because are we going to ask people who aren't good drivers to put their lives on hold on the off chance they kill someone? Better to let them all drive and vilify the unfortunate ones that do. However, with machines they have no personal lives so they are afforded no slack. Humans get to make mistakes because they are only human, but machines get no such affordances... even if the net benefit is there.
ghaff 6y ago
>when you consider how high road mortality is Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the rate is not really all that high.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#Driving_versus_flying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That seems an unrealistic bar especially as a hypothetical self-driving vehicle will be co-existing with human-driven cars even on main roads for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, airliners are flown by a pair of trained professionals, within an air traffic control system that minimizes their exposure to most serious threats, and are mostly (some bird strikes, sensor failures, etc. notwithstanding) flying under conditions that are fairly predictable. OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)
    - atharris 6y ago
      I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light (otherwise - it's not a very good collision avoidance system!)

ImprobableTruth 6y ago

I think what further compounds this is that normally responsibility for accidents is 'distributed' across the population. whereas with autonomous driving it's going to be a single/a few companies shouldering it all. Being even responsible even just for 10% of total road fatalities (~4000 deaths per year) would be absolutely ruinous if they're held liable for them.

ghaff 6y ago
There's (arguably) the limited exception of pharmaceuticals--and, even there, there's a government fund to handle people who get sick or die because of vaccines. But it's hard to otherwise identify products used by consumers that, when maintained and used properly, sometimes randomly kill people and we shrug our shoulders and say "Stuff happens. Still a net benefit to society." We certainly don't do it today in the case of manufacturing or design defects in vehicles.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Responsibility for accidents is concentrated in insurance companies. Nothing substantial will change.

barnacled 6y ago

I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers. Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might be better but that doesn't fully paint a picture of what those numbers would look like. I also think the 'will randomly kill people, but rarely' aspect of self-driving cars will be majorly off-putting on a very human level. And finally there's a perception issue here - the self-driving hype is around the idea that the car is effectively being driven by a far better driver than a human, the second it turns out it does really crazy things sometimes (doesn't even have to involve fatalities necessarily) is also going to put people off I think. I personally prefer the idea of driver assists (responsibly developed so drivers aren't just distracted) aiding driver safety while we work on a supplemental self-driving solution, or perhaps as discussed in the article create some infrastructure along roads to make things more certain. I am far from being against self-driving cars, I just feel the timeline is longer than currently hyped.

pedrocr 6y ago
I agree completely. My take from the situation is much more that we are far far too lenient with our standards for cars, roads, and particularly drivers. We've set the bar so low that the technology has a good chance of clearing it soon but only serve to reveal how actually uncomfortable we are with such a low bar that we've normalized over time.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  In many parts of North America you cannot function in society without a license. Therefore, we have sympathy for people because are we going to ask people who aren't good drivers to put their lives on hold on the off chance they kill someone? Better to let them all drive and vilify the unfortunate ones that do. However, with machines they have no personal lives so they are afforded no slack. Humans get to make mistakes because they are only human, but machines get no such affordances... even if the net benefit is there.

ghaff 6y ago

>when you consider how high road mortality is Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the rate is not really all that high.

pedrocr 6y ago
That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#Driving_versus_flying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
- ghaff 6y ago
  That seems an unrealistic bar especially as a hypothetical self-driving vehicle will be co-existing with human-driven cars even on main roads for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, airliners are flown by a pair of trained professionals, within an air traffic control system that minimizes their exposure to most serious threats, and are mostly (some bird strikes, sensor failures, etc. notwithstanding) flying under conditions that are fairly predictable. OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)
  - atharris 6y ago
    I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light (otherwise - it's not a very good collision avoidance system!)