14 ms·
Humans are remarkably safe at driving
- rhacker 6y agoI randomly said in my head 80 Million, apparently I was off by 20 million.
- busyant 6y agoSo, basically spot on. With these types of questions, I feel like if you're within 1/2 an order of magnitude, you answered correctly.
- ghaff 6y agoThe headline is calculated to provoke a reaction and is actually fairly accurate. But then the piece just argues for collecting a ton of "data" from Amazon delivery vans without articulating what collecting all this data is expected to accomplish. Data gets thrown around as a mindless incantation with respect to autonomy. Yes you need data. But just collecting lots of data and feeding it into a computer somewhere doesn't make better autonomy just pop out of the other end.
- giantg2 6y agoAmazon drivers seem to be some of the worst drivers I've seen - speeding, stopping on blind turns, and trouble backing up or negotiating driveways.
- jhfdbkofdcho 6y agoNo joking, just this morning outside my house in a residential neighborhood it’s raining heavily and a fully loaded prime van is gunning it and peeling out and fish tailing. I thought the driver was gonna crash for sure!
- mattbee 6y agoIsn't that because they're expected to meet insane delivery schedules with severe consequences for their pay if they can't make them?
- ljlolel 6y agoI also wrote a book with more detail: https://gumroad.com/l/KBBhm https://gumroad.com/l/KBBhm
- falcor84 6y ago>I know Waymo’s is a dead-end demo. This very controversial statement appears in the middle there without any real justification.
- ljlolel 6y agoThanks for the feedback, I added a link there to https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-passenger-lives-3ee2d0e55f5f https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...
- applecrazy 6y agoI’m sorry, but your statement in this article is just wrong. Tesla autopilot has killed people when it’s malfunctioned, thereby making it significantly more unsafe (in the eyes of any sane person) than Waymo’s AV (which has not killed anyone to my knowledge). And the title is quite poor as well—it is in fact Tesla who’s gambling lives by aggressively rolling out their self-driving capabilities before they’re fully baked (and having paying customers bet test them), not Waymo (who runs very limited demos in very controlled conditions).
- haberman 6y agoThere is also a separate article from this site that speculates that Tesla's easily observable quality problems with Autopilot are actually the result of Tesla intentionally hobbling it so drivers don't become complacent: https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-awful-until-its-perfect-8fb0b0764ef8 https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-aw... The article admits it has no evidence for this speculation ("Is Tesla doing this? Perhap not.") but at other points assumes it is true ("This is the Safety Paradox. Tesla cannot launch its safest, newest version of the algorithm for every driving mile because that would, paradoxically, cause more accidents since the safest, newest software would be above the L3 Barrier.") It then makes the further unsupported assertion that you can measure the extent to which Tesla has "perfected" its self-driving capability by measuring the rate of Tesla accidents that occur when Autopilot is not enabled, theorizing that this is the only mode where Tesla has not hobbled its safety features. In this mode, the article theorizes, the full power of Tesla's self-driving technology goes to "correct for human driving, as if one has a virtual bumper car, protecting and cocooning the driver." In general the site seems quite pro-Tesla and anti-Waymo. Disclosure: I work for Google but also own a Tesla.
- ljlolel 6y agoAuthor here: two more related pieces I wrote with more ideas Why Tesla Autopilot ought to be awful, until it’s perfect https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-awful-until-its-perfect-8fb0b0764ef8?q https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-aw... Waymo Gambles Lives with Unsupervised Self-Driving Cars https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-passenger-lives-3ee2d0e55f5f?p https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...
- analog31 6y agoI admit that when I read something like this, I'm always thinking about whether "framing" is in play. Sure, 100 million miles is a lot, but at 10k miles/y and 50 y/lifetime, that's 200 lifetimes. Is something that will kill you in 200 lifetimes considered to be "remarkably" safe? Granted, I'm certainly not downplaying your conclusion about the challenge of designing a self driving car.
- ljlolel 6y agoCar crashes are a top cause of death for humans
- swiley 6y agoI don't know what happened this year but since I started driving again after being in lockdown I've gotten into two accidents. Maybe the three month break from driving affected me more than I thought.
- sp332 6y agoI try to get out for a drive once a week to keep my car in working order (slosh some oil around, keep the tires from getting flat on one side). Maybe it's good for my brain, too.
- alisonkisk 6y agoArticle is void of content. It just says that the average person has about a 0.01% chance of dying in a car crash each year, ignoring that being permanently crippled or having your car crushed is inconvenient as well.
- michaelcampbell 6y agoThat something else is bad, does not make one thing not bad. You say "void of content", then list content.
- savrajsingh 6y agorelevant subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/
- libertine 6y agoFrom my driving experience... I've seen way too many near-accidents being actively avoided by other drivers (myself included) that saved bad drivers and other innocent drivers. Specially too many near frontal collisions, some left dumb found, namely those done in curves and slopes, or trying to pass large and compact lines of cars. I don't understand the decision making process of those few wild cards. Somehow they're lucky that everyone else aren't like them.
- mnd999 6y agoSure, if we could improve the driving of those at the bottom then safety would be even better. I think the point the article is trying to make is that it’s already pretty good.
- libertine 6y agoYes I understand that, I just wanted to give an extra credit do the "regular" drivers that sometimes make an extra active effort to save themselves and others, sometimes putting themselves at risk (which at the time could be a perceived as "less-riskier"), yet it's decisions made in fractions of seconds.
- rizzom5000 6y agoI believe it's absolutely possible to do more to reduce to incompetency behind the wheel on US roads. It may even be trivial to reduce preventable traffic fatalities in the US by half. We accept these preventable fatal as a society. Per 1 billion miles driven, the US fatality rate is nearly 2x that of Germany. https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/why-getting-a-german-drivers-license-was-one-of-the-hardest-things-ive-ever-done.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/why-getting-a-german-drive... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
- modzu 6y agothis made me think about my car's infotainment UI (typically have android auto running) and how annoying it is that much of it locks while the car is in motion. searching for an address in waze, accessing a text message, etc. even worse is some things work for a few seconds (scrolling down my list of songs) before it locks and says "eyes back on the road... wait a minute", and unlocks again. this is terrible when i have a passenger who could help (could you search for a gas station, or please reply to that message we will be late) which requires pulling over. whats more safe on a freeway? it sort of reminds me of red light cameras, which have been proven to cause drivers to burn through yellows at 100 miles an hour (increasing crashes on the other side) to avoid the fine for what would otherwise be a minor issue. i digress..
- jacquesm 6y agoYou shouldn't be pulling over on a freeway for stuff like that either. You should do it in a parking space.
- Noumenon72 6y agoI'm glad I am living in the era before do-gooders take control of our phones and prevent us from using our own judgment about safety tradeoffs. So many restaurants I've found, plans I've made, songs I've remembered, on empty roads or in Nebraska in broad daylight. I've encountered multiple people who don't think it's safe to use your phone while stopped at a light. They're intolerant of other opinions so they will win eventually.
- hn_user82179 6y agoI would agree, but I've also been a passenger with drivers who insist on using their phone (and won't let me text for them) and watched the car veer back and forth, where they'd correct just after the car had crossed the lane line. I don't ride with those people more than once, but these were people who are otherwise intelligent, educated, kind humans. The problem with trusting humans to use their own judgement is that it is very self-focused: "Am I going to die in an accident?", not, "Could I hurt or kill someone else"? Given how many people (at least in the US) refuse to wear masks for the health of those around them right now, I don't think those people would also be concerned about hitting others. FWIW, I think it's possible to safely use your phone at a stoplight (I frequently do), but I saw my friend release the brake and start rolling and then look up from his phone, because he had seen it was green in his peripheral vision. That is not safe, and I think scenarios like this happen more than we realize.
- snthd 6y ago>Here’s a quick question: how far would you have to drive before you die in a car accident? Please don't call them "accidents". https://crashnotaccident.com https://crashnotaccident.com >Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions. >Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars. >Planes don’t have accidents. They crash. Cranes don’t have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions. >Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let’s stop using the word "accident" today.
- ljlolel 6y agoThanks for the feedback, I agree. I updated it to 'crash'
- ljlolel 6y agoWhy was this downvoted?
- nottorp 6y ago>Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. I suppose we could ban streets and cars... if they're all so dangerous?
- sp332 6y agoWe've banned certain types of streets and many, many types of cars. So... yes?
- dkural 6y agoNorway is working on reaching 0 deaths, in their "Vision Zero" program. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/01/03/vision-zero-norwegian-capital-completely-quashes-road-deaths/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/01/03/vision-zero-norwegian...
- deleted 6y ago
- tayistay 6y agoOk, 100M miles until death. How many miles until injury?
- jlebar 6y agoSince the article calls out Waymo engineers: I'm a software engineer at Waymo, speaking for myself. I agree with the premise of the article. Humans are remarkably good at driving, and making a computer better will be hard. Where I may disagree with the author is, I think the project is both feasible and worth doing. It's worth doing because we drive a remarkable amount. Even at human safety level, more than a million people die every year in car crashes. As far as feasibility, Waymo is, today, running a fully autonomous, no-human-behind-the-wheel ride hailing service in Arizona. It's not a dead-end demo, it's there. I know, a Phoenix suburb is not the same as NYC or Mumbai. Trust me, I know -- probably better than you! Nonetheless, what we accomplished was impossible a few years ago. The history of AI is a history of moving the goalposts and then blowing past them. AlphaGo solves what was considered one of the hardest problems in AI, but now that I see how you did it, eh, it's not that impressive. GPT-3 passes the Turing Test and can almost pass a coding phone screen, but come on, nobody really thought that a machine that passed TT would be intelligent. It was just a few years ago that respectable people were saying we'd never solve protein folding. Now that we have, the goalposts have moved again. Don't worry, we'll blow past those, too. Except this time people will yawn. So give us some time. This too will happen slowly, and then all at once.
- ljlolel 6y agoI am the author, and I am a self-driving car engineer too! Waymo is an inspiring project, many friends work there, and it literally inspired me to work on self-driving cars. I wrote this to help people in the industry have the right context in the right way. As to Waymo's driverless testing, it's dangerous! See here what I wrote about why: https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-passenger-lives-3ee2d0e55f5f https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...
- pontus 6y agoOne of the issues that companies like Waymo will have to face is that it's not going to be enough to be better than a human driver, you actually have to be better than a human driver with lane assist, blind spot checkers, adaptive cruise control, etc. As self driving technology matures, so does driving assistance technology. The 100 Million miles that a human driver will have to drive on average to die in a crash will be pushed to a billion miles+ before L5 is achieved, effectively moving the goal post further. Ultimately self driving technology has to be better not than a human, but than human intervention. It has to be so good that it recognizes when a human incorrectly intervenes to override L4 decisions and then be able to override that human's overriding. Only then will autonomous vehicles overtake humans.
- otras 6y ago> Most humans in a matter of a few hours can operate any multi-ton vehicle in most weather anywhere in the world. As road conditions change humans instantaneously adapt control response and safety protocols. I would bet that the author has not had the chance to observe common driving practices in New England by drivers unfamiliar with winter weather conditions. Ideally we would all slow down in the snow, but I would hesitate to claim that we all adopt those safety protocols.
- ljlolel 6y agoAnd yet the numbers aren't much worse! Amazing and suprising, right?
- bichiliad 6y agoI think getting killed in a car crash as the driver of a car is an overly specific measurement. What about injuries? What about if you’re struck by a driver while crossing the street? One statistic that comes to mind is that in a crash involving a drunk driver, the drunk driver is much less likely to die because they don’t tend to tense up before the impact of the crash.
- ljlolel 6y agoThey're still remarkably rare, don't change the analysis much, and don't matter as much as fatalities. What does get harder is there is no objective idea of what is a "major" accident versus "minor" accident, so you can spend a lot of time arguing and manipulating statistics, whereas death is easier to quantify objectively and compare (and also happens to be the most serious thing so a necessary analysis anyway).
- cainxinth 6y agoI think about this all the time. I'll be on the highway, cruising along with lots of other cars moving at a high rate of speed all around me and just marvel at the fact that, generally, everything works out ok.
- ape4 6y agoArticle doesn't mention deaths/injury to pediatricians/cyclists.
- ljlolel 6y agoThis is including deaths to pedestrians and cyclists
- djsumdog 6y agoI wrote something similar a few years back, but I treated it more as a simple capacity issue: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Even in smaller cities, building transportation infrastructure would greatly reduce congestion, and even reduce the need for future highway expansion. The common excuse is "America isn't built that way" but .. well it was at one time, less than 100 years ago. We use to have more streetcars and passenger rail than EU does now! I didn't address the technical merits, but we've already seen leaked Google training data on here (that was really bad training data because it seemed to use automated/AI to build the training data and put boxes around a lot of things it shouldn't have ... can't find the link to that now), we know about Uber's engineers screwing up royally and killing a cyclist, we know about Tesla's autopilot getting people killed ... which shows even using sensors as safety features may make people less attentive to the road. It's a hard problem space. Personally when I get really old and can't drive anymore, I'd prefer to live some place where I could still walk to cycle or take a train everywhere I really need to. I trust that stuff more than us finding the magic bullet to self-driving AI. And I think what we can get from this article: good self driving AI requires advanced general purpose AI. And once you have that, good luck getting something that intelligent to drive you car. I imagine Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide, "The most advanced robot in the galaxy asked to do the most menial tasks ... fix the engine Marvin. Fly the ship Marvin. Go buy groceries Marvin ... I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
- dkural 6y agoI looked up the death rate, state-by-state variability is interesting: "The death rate per 100 million miles traveled ranged from 0.54 in Massachusetts to 1.83 in South Carolina.Footnote1" https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state#:~:text=There%20were%2033%2C654%20fatal%20motor,per%20100%20million%20miles%20traveled https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....
- Inhibit 6y agoWith drive through liquor stores? Sounds about right.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- syntaxing 6y agoDisclaimer, my thoughts are of my own and not of my employer. I work in the SDC industry as well but on hardware so I wanted to share my thoughts. I'm guessing the author does not work on the hardware side of things because the safety and verification processes is transparent and obvious. I agree with the premise that humans are great drivers and replacing humans will be a tough challenge (which makes it fun). However, the idea that SDCs cannot be verified and the rockets vs SDC analogy is incorrect. Let's go even closer and just compare cars to SDCs. What makes your standard cars that has 150+ of HP safe? Better yet, most of this energy comes from explosion of fuel! Any of the mechanical failures in a car can lead to death (brake calipers breaking, ECU malfunction, pistonhead cannonball, etc). But yet, how often do you hear in the news someone dies because their car exploded while using it? The reason why cars are robust is not because it's mechanical, deterministic, some sort of inherent physical laws, or manufactures test every single part coming out of the production line. But rather cars are safe because there is a robust safety system that heavily incorporates a verification and validation process with a promoted transparency process that mitigate risk. A good example of this is ASIL (ISO-26262) [1] and FMEA processes [2]. Other industries like rocket/military (like you mentioned) and medical both deploy the same type of model to make their product safe and robust. There is no glaring technical barrier that prevents SDC. The hardest barrier for a product has always been cost vs profit (likewise for most products, economics of it always comes first). [1]https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26262:-9:ed-1:en https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26262:-9:ed-1:en [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy...
- todd8 6y agoI've had a few harrowing driving experiences and fortunately, no serious crashes. The difficult driving experiences where just so rare that I would be surprised if a self-driving vehicle would know what to do. * I once had a car driving way above the speed limit approach me from the rear, it passed me by jumping the curb driving on grass and sidewalk and swerving back onto the street in front of me. * Another time I was driving back to a rental house in the Aspen area and the snowstorm had gotten bad enough to completely cover and obscure the road on the hillside I was driving on. My wheels went off the road, fortunately on the side away from the drop off and I was driving slowly, but then I couldn't get back on the road without using enough power that I feared I would swerve off the road on down the hill. This required a bit of puzzle solving before I could safely get back on the road. * I've had bad GPS data that kept me circling my destination without every getting me there. I just think that such unusual situations are going to be difficult for autonomous cars to understand very soon.
- carapace 6y agoIf we set it up right[1] the cars share data/experience so that each one learns from the whole fleet. A novel situation will only be novel once, for one car, then all the rest will be able to handle similar future situations "by the book". [1] I don't think manufacturers of self-driving cars (and can we please call them "auto-autos"!?) should compete on safety, rather, I think it should be mandated legally that they have to share data on crashes with a view to preventing further crashes. Like the aviation industry, eh?
- mcguire 6y agoNote that in one of Perla's linked articles, he argues that Tesla's approach to testing autonomous vehicles is better than Waymo's because unpaid safety drivers are cheaper than paid safety drivers. "Moreover, Waymo cannot get the requisite number of miles to either prove safety or truly get all the edge case long-tail test data to make it safer than humans. It’s too expensive to pay trained safety drivers, since you need more data and more miles to get edge case data as you get safer and safer. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars or more to drive the billions of needed miles. It’s not even close to possible to get enough paid rides in remote Arizona to drive billions of miles. The unsupervised rides save them a bit of money, but risk lives, so at what cost to the population, to us? "As a comparison, Tesla gathers test data cheaply. Tesla had at least 10 billion miles of data driven this year worldwide in every condition, and customers paid them for the privilege to drive them as (unpaid, non-professional) supervising safety drivers." I believe he's right about the data, although I'm not entirely sure about the quality of the data. I am also not sure I'm happy with his, and Tesla's, solution. (In order to discover edge cases, you have to put the vehicle in potentially dangerous situations and hope that the unpaid safety driver can extricate it without killing anyone.)
- kabrn 6y agoEvery comment here frames the conversation in terms of the safety of the cars and the number of crashes they could prevent, which is exactly the propaganda these companies want us to buy and further spread. Let us not forget that the true end goal is to make a profit and to "disrupt" existing establishments; that it may or may not prevent crashes is only a convenient side effect for them to advertise.
- dehrmann 6y ago> Most humans in a matter of a few hours can operate any multi-ton vehicle in most weather anywhere in the world. I was shocked at how easy it was to rent a car (with insurance!) in a country that drives on the other side of the road, and how not inept I was at driving like that. It's still a little nerve-racking.
- carapace 6y agoI don't recall when I first realized how insanely good at driving humans are, but I was a kid, and in Bayesian terms it gave me a strong prior for the existence of some sort of Guardian Angels until I learned more about how the our motor minds work. We move with extreme precision and coordination on the unconscious level even when we seem clumsy or uncoordinated on the conscious level. We are acting out cultural and personal formats or roles, a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion. This is part of the reason that you can learn hypnosis and accelerate learning: we are operating at a fraction of our potential due to old programming, upgrade your software and it unlocks "new" capabilities.
- jnskleiber 6y agoWe now have a big problem in the form of skeptical people. Although, these are just non-tech people who consider themselves smarter than everyone else. How can people write about terrorists and hackers ... If everything were so simple, all the systems of banks and classified information would have been hacked long ago and the world would have been chaos. As for the insecurity of such a movement, I agree. But this is only for now, because there are many questions to which there are no answers. I don't care about promises when it will be, because I perfectly understand that it depends not only on the developers: there are many external reasons, self-driving cars are unlikely to quickly gain popularity. Autonomous driving has a lot of responsibility, concentration on the move. Yes, everyone has their own driving style, their own rules, but this is a solvable problem in the future. By the way, I advise all skeptics to read https://blog.andersenlab.com/de/can-self-driving-cars-drive-better-than-we-do/ https://blog.andersenlab.com/de/can-self-driving-cars-drive-... Of course, there are difficulties with implementation, because pedestrians are unpredictable. But the biggest problem is in non tech people, read the tech articles first before condemning the ease of accessibility of the system. The only problem is that machines can't think.