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Self-driving vehicles against human drivers: Equal safety is far from enough

• Bostonian 6y ago
  I think this related to the "illusion of control". People feel safer when they are driving, rather than a machine, even when they are not safer. I hope government regulators do not impose 5x safety requirements on self-driving cars.
  • VHRanger 6y ago
    It's inertia rather. People can drive tomorrow because people can drive today
  • macintux 6y ago
    I think we also want someone to blame for an accident, and it’s not at all obvious who to blame when a self-driving vehicle is at fault.
    • philipov 6y ago
      If corporations are people, you should be able to bring criminal murder and manslaughter charges against them, with the top-level executives acting as proxies to serve the jail sentence.
    • spaetzleesser 6y ago
      You may have to sue the manufacturer and prove that their system is at fault. Which is pretty much impossible considering the legal resources these big corporations have versus the little guy. This would end up like tobacco or junk food where companies were able (and still are) able to deflect any kind of responsibility.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      Assuming the system is properly maintained and used, if anyone's responsible it has to be the manufacturer. Certainly the passenger isn't any more than if an Uber gets in an accident today. And, with the possible exception of drug side effect (and even there there are lawsuits), we don't really see consumer-facing products that, even if used as directed, kill a fair number of people and we just go oops. Let's say autonomous vehicles kill 3,000/year in the US, i.e. 10% of the current rate. (In reality, human-driven cars will take a long time to be phased out even when self-driving is available but go with the thought experiment.) Can you imagine any other product we accept killing thousands of people a year and we're fine with that? ADDED: As someone else noted, you could argue that tobacco etc. fall into that category but we're mostly not OK with that and is reasonably thought of as in another category. (And pretty much no one is smoking because they think it's good for them.)
      • the8472 6y ago
        > Can you imagine any other product we accept killing thousands of people a year and we're fine with that? Unhealthy foods?
        • ghaff 6y ago
          Just about any food is potentially unhealthy if not consumed in moderation. A bag of potato chips and a Coke now and then isn't going to kill anyone. But a couple bags and half a dozen cans a day sure isn't good for you. And a porterhouse steak every day probably isn't that great for you either.
          • the8472 6y ago
            You asked for accepted products that kill people, not for products that kill unconditionally. Foods are conditionally unsafe (if consumed in excess) just like cars are conditionally unsafe (if not operated carefully). Deaths by cardiovascular diseases (partially caused by inappropriate diet) exceed vehicular deaths. And yet they're accepted.
            • ghaff 6y ago
              There is no shortage of products that can injure or kill you if you operate them unsafely including cars. But you won't "operate" an autonomous vehicle at least while it's autonomous. An autonomous vehicle causing an accident due to a software mistake is the equivalent of a regular automobile suddenly losing steering control because of a design defect on a highway--and the latter would absolutely be a liability issue for the car maker.
              • the8472 6y ago
                Right, I forgot that this was an argument about responsibility. In the case of food I guess there's some shared responsibility. The customers of course have a lot of choice here, but the manufacturer still optimizes for tastiness (increasing consumption) without necessarily optimizing for healthiness. That could also be considered a design defect. Perhaps for an owned autonomous vehicle the equivalent shared responsibility would be a user-selectable conservative ("comfort") vs. aggressive ("sporty") driving style. Or the option to drive yourself and only let the software intervene if it thinks what you're doing is unsafe. So, back to the question > We don't really see consumer-facing products that, even if used as directed, kill a fair number of people and we just go oops. The only very nebulous other case that comes to mind are unsafe computer systems in general. When a hospital or critical infrastructure gets hacked then this is treated almost like an unavoidable natural disaster rather than the responsibility of the operator or manufacturer.
    • anonuser123456 6y ago
      It may be easier to find fault in an autonomous vehicle. Assuming it has a black box that records sensor data, you can replay the algorithm and see what went wrong.
  • Analemma_ 6y ago
    The illusion of control is a thing, but actual control is a thing as well. One possible reason to avoid self-driving cars is that there actually are safe and unsafe drivers, and fatal accidents in self-driving cars will presumably be a much flatter distribution among those drivers than the one we have now. Which means that even if they're safer overall, they could still be less safe if you're a good driver.
  • mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    If they are setting an objective measurement, how is that an illusion of control? In fact it seems like exactly the opposite - they are putting hard numbers on the level of risk they consider tolerable. They are making that available to everyone so they can debate and dispute it. If anything, this is removing the illusion of control. The illusion of control would be to say you would never trust self-driving cars. Saying you will trust them at a level of 5x measurable safety criteria above human drivers is totally different. Now we can make actuarial arguments about whether it should be 5x vs 2.6x vs 0.9x and debate how to measure the safety criteria - that’s a completely different world from one where people “feel like” human control of the car is safer.
    • dash2 6y ago
      For sure it is good to seek a measurable criterion. The question is whether laboratory subjects' views on the right level should have normative force. An alternative take is: these are just not-very-informed people, and unless they can give reasons for their views, we shouldn't take them seriously as inputs into the policy-making process.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• spaetzleesser 6y ago
  This seems pretty reasonable and also very possible to achieve. It would be insane to allow a technology on the streets that makes as many mistakes as humans are making. I certainly wouldn’t use self driving cars if they killed 30000 people per year like humans are doing right now. How would you assign responsibility for crashes? Our current system is far from perfect but at least it’s something people understand and know how to navigate. And there are drivers that are better and more cautious than others. So it’s not just an illusion of control.
• sreekotay 6y ago
  Engendering trust and reducing materially regressive liability/litigiousness is a good call - and something that SHOULD be set as a standard by an external body. IMHO this is typically a good role for government regulation - setting a standard measurement of outcome for the public good, but not dictacting HOW that should be achieved. Now, we're just haggling over the price... ( as not-churchill infamously didn't say...)
  • dash2 6y ago
    On the face of it, the delay in accepting self-driving cars till they are 5x safer would cost thousands of lives in the interim (while they are only twice as safe, three times as safe etc.) Is there a reason ordinary people's views should have prescriptive force here? Maybe they're just flat wrong.
    • msandford 6y ago
      Arguing that people should do what you want, irrespective of what they themselves want leads to all kinds of pain, on all sides. "Why are people voting against their own self-interest?" is an analogous phrase. It seems awfully condescending to me. Nobody's bound to your perspective of what's rational. Better to just accept that this is the kind of hurdle that self-driving will have to jump over and work on getting there ASAP. Elon realized that the best way to get people to buy electric cars was to make electric cars that are better than gas cars, not to tell people they're wrong and stupid for not wanting to buy some inferior electric car. Once self-driving cars are obviously better than all but the best race drivers, people will accept them as a matter of course.
      • dash2 6y ago
        I didn't say people should do what I want. I said that a random focus group's opinion does not necessarily override objective reasoning about what will save lives. Would you use this approach to decide whether the 737 should fly again, or what is the appropriate price of carbon, or how strictly to restrict activities during the Covid pandemic?
    • 6y ago
• brighton36 6y ago
  Doesn't this 5x requirement hurt more people than (say) 1.00001x? What am I missing here...
  • nextaccountic 6y ago
    This is a psychological experiment. People aren't rational.
  • toolz 6y ago
    I think this high level of certainty is basically just the governments way of acknowledging they are terrible at gathering/defining useful metrics and so with a wide margin there's very little room for error on the politicians part. I'm unsure if this is overly cynical, but I don't expect politicians today became career politicians by worrying about safety more than protecting their political status. Further, I suspect media would look for any definition possible to blame politicians for deaths so politicians feel it necessary to be blameless before allowing interesting, progressive ideas to materialize.
  • zebrafish 6y ago
    I would say that we tend to reduce human flourishing to exclusively being alive. I think the 5x multiplier maybe covers things like loss of liability in an accident, a sense of ownership of the vehicle, loss of privacy or obscurity, regulatory or operational infrastructure costs associated with a switch to self-driving, freedom of choice, etc. All of these have some ultimate impact on human flourishing beyond just a binary dead or alive definition. My opinion is, if these aren’t included in the 5x, they should be.
  • notatoad 6y ago
    This is not the government saying "we the government require...". It's the results of a study of what people believe. people's risk tolerance is almost never rooted in a rational calculation. Risk tolerance is based on emotion, and self-driving cars currently trigger an emotional response. As soon as self-driving cars become a regular part of people's lives and not an exciting new thing, the calculation will shift to a much more rational one
• rstarast 6y ago
  How far do we think human drivers' safety level ranges? Like most drivers I'm falsely convinced I'm a safer driver than most, but still I expect quite a large range (say a factor 10 between 10th and 90th percentile?). It seems reasonable for self-driving cars to be expected to improve safety over human driving for the large majority of drivers, not just half of them.
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    But how false is that impression that we are safer than average? I don't drive drunk, drugged, tired or distracted. I avoid driving in bad weather. I make sure I have good tires and brakes. I don't intentionally speed. I bet most accidents are caused by the above. I'm not interested in a self-driving car that drives like it's checking its cellphone after 3 beers.
    • rootusrootus 6y ago
      Exactly this. Some people think that Tesla's autopilot is just great, better than a human driver much of the time. As a Tesla owner, I am flabbergasted by that. At best, AP drives like I do. That is, perfectly straight and between the lines down a straight road. With any curves, and sometimes just on straight roads, it drives like a high-functioning alcoholic. I can't imagine how some people drive normally where they think that qualifies as 'good driving.' Some of us are very attentive drivers -- I never look at my cell phone, I never drink and drive, I don't drive when I'm tired, I avoid driving in inclement weather or at night unless strictly necessary, I am a very defensive driver. I don't get tickets, I don't get in wrecks, and this is by design -- I take great pains to reduce my exposure to these risks. Personally I think the old joke about how 90% of drivers think they're better than average is both true, and also just a funny joke. We see a lot of perfectly good drivers on the road, but we don't notice them ... because they're perfectly good. There's only a few lanes on any given road, though, so if 10% of drivers in near proximity are crappy drivers then it practically shuts down the road. We notice that, and assume that most drivers are crap. Wrong.
      • sliken 6y ago
• rozab 6y ago
  Would this baseline include all the accidents from distracted drivers, drunk drivers, drug drivers etc.? Or is it referring to an average human driver who isn't intentionally breaking the law? If the baseline includes all these sorts of human error, I see no issue with holding robots to a higher standard. Imagine if we rolled out robot policemen who only executed black people for no reason at the same rate as humans do.
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    Without meaning to comment on how possible it would be to carry out on a policy level, replacing the worst human drivers with robot drivers that match average human drivers should be an improvement for everyone. It also potentially opens up policy options, or at least makes them easier to choose.
    • lftl 6y ago
      Interesting idea. I think there may be feasible political routes to accomplishing that. Tighten up the points system that basically every state uses for deciding when to suspend your license, and simply force those who would normally lose their license into robot driving.
    • ksk 6y ago
      What does "worst" mean? Did they get into an accident once or twice, but drive just fine on otherwise? Do they drive bad every single day? etc etc.
      • StanislavPetrov 6y ago
        One easy way to start would be to give basic reflex and reaction tests. On one of my last trips to the supermarket early this year before the COVID lockdowns started, I was on line behind a very elderly old woman (who for some reason had chosen the self-checkout line). She had trouble merely attempting to lift her groceries out of her basket and scan them. She was entirely unable to feed her bills into the feeder without assistance. As I was leaving the supermarket I watched her struggle to open her car door before slowly getting into her car. I sat in my car for a few minutes watching as she struggled mightily to simply back her car out of her parking spot. Here in New York, the roads are filled with elderly people like this. Mental acuity aside, they do not possess anywhere near the reflexes or dexterity to drive a car safely. Nonetheless, they are out there on the roads every day. It would be a trivial issue to implement basic physical and mental acuity tests that should be required in order to have a driver's license. Unfortunately this remains implausible because of the lack of an alternative means of transportation available to these elderly people (which could potentially be provided by self-driving vehicles).
• vincentmarle 6y ago
  I find it weird that nobody seems to talk about the national security implications of self-driving cars. Imagine the Russian cyber attack we just experienced happening on millions of self-driving cars...
  • xmodem 6y ago
    To be fair with the amount of computer control and always-online features in current cars, this is already a huge risk.
  • boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Why would a state actor do this? It's a clear declaration of war, and probably wouldn't kill more people than suddenly launching missiles. Even if they could somewhat hide it, the US is prone to retaliate on fairly flimsy pretexts. There may be some terrorism risk, but any truly terrifying scenario requires a multitude of incredibly stupid design choices. Like constant internet connection, remote updates, no manual override, and a single widespread system. Hacking stoplights is roughly as scary.
    • tgv 6y ago
      It will cripple a country and its economy.
      • boomboomsubban 6y ago
        So will bombs edit particularly as an attack on self driving cars would be an intentional targeting of civilians, and would likely be considered similar to using chemical weapons.
        • tgv 6y ago
          I think people have considered the national security implications of bombs. > particularly as an attack on self driving cars would be an intentional targeting of civilians Except it obviously isn't an attack on civilians.
• godelzilla 6y ago
  Why not safe, free, and extensive public transportation instead of dangerous and unsustainable pipe dreams?
• jedberg 6y ago
  This title is awful (but it was copied from the site). What it should say is "Study finds that most people surveyed didn't trust self driving cars until they were five times safer".
  • m463 6y ago
    More like "people who have never owned or been in a self driving car..." faster horses. That said, it will happen. I just wonder what will happen as self driving car safety exceeds human drivers. Will people be prohibited/disincentivized to drive?
    • rootusrootus 6y ago
      > what will happen as self driving car safety exceeds human drivers Average human drivers, or are you including the drunks and other bozos who cause the lion's share of fatalities?
    • happytoexplain 6y ago
      The comparison between all human drivers and all autonomous vehicles is far more complex than "whichever is statistically safer, as a whole". Belittling people who feel differently than you about it muddies the conversation for no reason.
      • m463 6y ago
        I apologize and cannot edit my comment.
• dooglius 6y ago
  Based on the abstract, it looks like this is an attempt to measure how safe self-driving cars need to be in order for people to prefer using them. It is not any sort of requirement from the NIH.
  • happytoexplain 6y ago
    I too was confused. I thought "we" referred to the NIH. It should say "people".
• Jabbles 6y ago
  I wonder what range in safety we tolerate in human drivers? How much worse than the average is a newly-licenced 17 year-old (or whatever age) or an 80 year-old?
  • rootusrootus 6y ago
    Well, in terms of overall crashes and injury crashes, you don't get safer than the 80 year old until you're 30 [1]. Though the rate of fatal wrecks is about the same between 16-17 and 80+. I think that may be due in large part to the fact that 80 year old humans are far more fragile and likely to die in a wreck where a younger person would walk away from. [1] https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/ https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
    • Jabbles 6y ago
      Very interesting, thank you for the data.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  If it's a subjective matter tied to perception of risk rather than actual, statistical risk, such perception can be swayed. The challenge remains that people will be killed in accidents involving autonomous control. And we anticipate that the number of people killed will be fewer, hence 'saving lives'. However, the lives lost in autonomous accidents will be a different set of people than those that would have died in human driven accidents. There will be cases where a court determines that the autonomous system was the cause. Families of those killed will want justice, while those separately saved by autonomous systems may never be heard from in the same case. I expect that in the end it will come down to a business decision, and that decision will be informed by an actuarial exercise: Will profits and insurance be able to cover the costs of defending and settling such cases. Who knows, maybe the threshold is crossed at 5x safer.
  • tgv 6y ago
    Idk about risk: that is hard to establish. There are so many conditions in which an automatic pilot hasn't been tested. We don't even know the factors involved in estimating the risk: e.g., is it dependent on the human co-pilot? And self-driving cars may change the car usage patterns, exerting a contextual influence on the risk. Then there's the question of responsibility. Who will be held responsible when the automatic pilot is driving? If it's the human, then a high risk of causing an accident will be unacceptable to many drivers.
  • Justsignedup 6y ago
    Sensationalism will win out quite a bit. And responsibility. Its just a tough problem. - People developing Bell's Palsy at the same rate with vaccine than not. But suddenly only those with the vaccine show up in the social media feeds. Because nobody just posts "I just got bell's palsy" but now they do because people are paying attention. Same will happen with AVs. "I just got into an AV accident" will make headlines, while "I just dozed off and hit a kid" will barely circulate. - People inherently trust humans over technology. Just because. So they will be quick to distrust autonomous vehicles. I already had convos about the fact that yes, teslas do kill, but on the whole self-driving teslas do kill far less than non. - When a human drives, the liability is on the human. When a car self-drives, the liability might be on the manufacturer.
• jhpriestley 6y ago
  this is quite an academic exercise since a decade of intensive research hasn't brought us close to working self-driving cars, much less 1x safe self-driving cars, much less 5x safe, nor is there any clear path to resolving this open research problem.
• c1505 6y ago
  That might be their current stated preference, but I don't think it will be most people's actual choices. Imagine if self driving was available on every car right now with the press of a button and it was as safe or twice as safe as a normal driver. How many people would press that button, start texting, and just continuing to progress to paying less and less attention ? People already don't pay the attention they should when driving or when using a driver assistant system.
  • franklampard 6y ago
    On the contrary, you can argue that button saves lives by doing a better job than the reckless drivers who aren’t going to pay attention in the first place.
  • loeg 6y ago
    Yeah, not to mention value of time. If I could hop in the car, at the same level of safety as my own driving, and spend the 1.5 hours to trailheads reading a book or even programming, I'd much rather be doing that than paying attention to the road.
• darksaints 6y ago
  What so many autonomous car advocates seem to miss is that it is nearly impossible to meaningfully compare relative safety with current self driving cars, because we don't have level 5 autonomy yet. In order to compare them with current technology, you'd have to be able to answer the question: how safe would human drivers actually be if they didn't have to perform their most difficult tasks? Because that is what current autonomy does. I'm willing to believe that current tech is capable of being safer than human drivers, simply because they do so many things way better than humans do, like stopping for pedestrians and safely navigating around cyclists. But to compare them in general, that is left to be proven. You can't just compare incidents per mile driven, because autonomous vehicles can conveniently opt out of driving whenever the task gets too hard.
  • Bedon292 6y ago
    It definitely tends to be the already safer driving, like highways, that they do well on. I have a Model 3, and trust it pretty well on highways. However it does not do turns at all, and other 'city driving' type tasks well. It can now do stop signs and traffic lights, which seems to be good so far too. However, not living in an area with many sidewalks, I do not trust it for one second to navigate around pedestrians or bicycles. I don't think it will actually try to go around a bike but, I have never given it the opportunity to either. I take full control back and give them a very wide berth myself.
  • jjk166 6y ago
    > You can't just compare incidents per mile driven, because autonomous vehicles can conveniently opt out of driving whenever the task gets too hard. But isn't that kind of the point? We use autonomous driving for the tasks where autonomy is objectively better, and we have the human do what the human is still better at. Best of both worlds.
    • bradlys 6y ago
      But that's not the goal of autonomous driving or the goal of most autonomous driving advocates. The goal is that you never need to know how to drive. It's essentially a taxi. Most people I know who are waiting for the autonomous driving future are waiting for one where they never have to drive. I imagine now: "Sorry, can't drive through this thick falling snow. Must pull over and you must operate now, human. We are 100 miles from civilization in any direction and no cellular service is available, best of luck!" I cannot imagine that most future drivers who are minimally driving in their daily life will be able to suddenly handle conditions that the "autonomous" vehicle cannot.
• anoyesnonymous 6y ago
  This should be calibrated to the risk the top X% of cautious/safe drivers, and exclude reckless, inexperienced, or intoxicated drivers. As a safe driver, you shouldn't have to accept risk calibrated to "average" (i.e. drunk, reckless) driver.
  • Isinlor 6y ago
    Nobody will be forcing you to buy self-driving car for quite a while. But as a safe driver, you should care about eliminating the most unsafe drivers from the roads.
    • falcolas 6y ago
      As a self-identified safe driver, no action I am capable of taking will put an unsafe driver in a self-driving car. I'll even go so far to say that many unsafe drivers can't afford a self-driving car. They're often unsafe because their car is on balding tires, the brakes don't work, and the tail lights are busted. The rest, well, they simply enjoy driving unsafely and thus have no reason to get into a self-driving car.
  • tgv 6y ago
    Exactly. Because now we can punish those individual drivers, lock them up, take away their car and license, but are we going to pull the plug on all cars with auto-pilot X because X is causing accidents? Is a small change in the software enough to establish it as a new driver? It's "smoking is good for you" all over again.
  • the8472 6y ago
    Why should it be? In the end the dead bodies count and it doesn't matter whether a cautious or inexperienced driver killed them. Inexperienced drivers are prerequisite of experienced drivers, there's no way to get rid of them. Excluding them from statistics is just discounting those deaths as... somehow less important? If a self-driving vehicle is only 1.5x (instead of 5x) as safe as the average human driver then you're not trading between death by humans vs. death by machine, you're primarily trading between death by human and spared by machine and only secondly between the former.
• JohnHaugeland 6y ago
  "We arbitrarily chose a number so we could feel like we were making improvements. Nothing justifies 5 over, say, 3, or 10. When cars are in fact 3x safer, all those saved lives won't be saved, because our arbitrary 5 has yet to be reached." This is meaningless and bad.
• bumby 6y ago
  Algorithm aversion is real and shows we prefer humans even in the face of statistical evidence that humans are sub-optimal decision makers. [1] I suspect it’s because we inherently dislike the idea of handing control over to a complex black box. Barring sociopaths, we can reasonably assume to interpret how a person thinks. This isn’t necessarily the case for algorithms, which leads to trust issues. [1] https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1392&context=fnce_papers https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=139...
• Scandiravian 6y ago
  So to speed up the adoption of self-driving cars, we could simply make human-driven cars more prone to accidents :p
  • xibalba 6y ago
    This is just the sort of outside-the-box thinking for which I read HN.
• Causality1 6y ago
  Is 5x safer a realistic goal? There are limits to how safe a car can be on a road full of human drivers, no matter what sensor suite it has and how fast its reactions are. A vehicle can only respond so quickly to control inputs. Making a computer that's five times as safe as a human might be a thousand times more difficult than making one twice as safe.
  • sliken 6y ago
    Depends how you count. Being is 5x less accidents might be unreasonably hard. But causing 5x less accidents seems reasonable, especially since most humans are that safe. I don't have the stats, but I believe the worst 20% of drivers cause a large fraction of the accidents. That 20% often includes the uninsured, the unlicensed, the drunk, high, emotionally distressed, and the physically compromised (senile, low blood sugar, tired, etc)
    • Causality1 6y ago
      That's true but beside the point. The moment autonomous cars become better than the median human driver, keeping them off the road starts costing lives every day.
• davidmurdoch 6y ago
  I rented a 2019 Mercedes last week and drove it for over 1200 miles, most of which was driven with the cars driving assist technologies enabled. My guess is that because this car drives so "carefully", such as automatically following at a safe distance (leaving maybe a 3 second gap between the car in front of it), human drivers will end up causing many more accidents. There must have been more than 50 drivers (with many annoyed stares into my window as they passed) that made unnecessary lane changes to go around me just to then closely follow the car in front of me. This large gap may make it seem like the car is going slower than it is, as so many drivers tried to overtake me but failed as slower traffic in the other lanes blocked them. Human drivers may just become worse over time as more law-abiding autonomous vehicles hit the road. "5x" might not be as much of an improvement in the future.
  • stronglikedan 6y ago
    I like the adaptive cruise control, because it drives more carefully than me. I have the same experience as you when I use it, regarding other drivers, but then I realize they're going to drive that way whether I'm using it or not. Therefore, I'm of the opinion that human drivers other than myself will cause the same amount of accidents, but I may cause less using while using it, so in the end there will be less accidents caused by human drivers as more people use adaptive cruise.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • renewiltord 6y ago
    I hope people aren't driving with cruise control in the left lane. I think I'd probably pass on the right to get clear of them.
    • davidmurdoch 6y ago
      This is much more than just your classic speed-only "cruise control". You certainly couldn't drive with classic cruise control in a center or right hand lane (USA) for any extended period of time, at least not in normal highway-speed traffic where cars are merging in and out every few miles.
• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  This is 100% just an artifact of a system going from human control to non-human control. Nobody bats an eye at systems which were never human controlled - or transitioned so long ago that nobody recalls human control. I've never seen anyone hesitate when getting on a fully automated train system at an airport or an elevator. Even more-so with amusement park rides that literally put people in extreme situations.
  • stkdump 6y ago
    In amusement parks you get a much smaller selection of the population than on the street or even at an airport. People who don't enjoy thrill just have no reason to visit them at all. Aside from that, all the systems you mentioned are mechanically constrained way more than a car. Accidents happen, when these mechanical constraints physically fail, not when a computer makes a wrong choice because it failed to detect an obstacle or similar.
• segmondy 6y ago
  What's so magical about 5? Why not 4x or 6x. 2x safer will be 500,000 lives saved yearly. We can see that even 1.25x safer is very significant. Just weird seeing that magic number 5x...
  • Traster 6y ago
    I don't think it's useful to talk about global traffic deaths in this context. Since obviously regulation will change by country, the difficulty of developing self driving will change by country, and road safety varies enormously by country. The US is likely to get self-driving first, but is already way safer than the average country, and the countries where deaths are higher are less likely to be able to afford the roll out of self-driving cars. In the US there are ~36,000 deaths from motorvehicle accidents. To give some context, America could improve their fatality right by 5x by bringing themselves into line with the safety standards observed in Western Europe whose fatality rate is already at around 2.7 per 100,000 people. It's also important to remember that self-driving is likely to represent the safest journeys - highway commutes etc.
  • Tempest1981 6y ago
    Something psychological I guess? Or maybe one group said 2x and another said 10x? > psychological mechanisms influencing the decision-making regarding acceptable risk
  • sliken 6y ago
    Not magical, but you have to pick something. I suspect the goal is to pick a number that most would think is better than an experienced, awake, attentive (not looking at a phone) human at the wheel. So even the safest drivers would be safer on the road as the number of autonomous driven cars increases. At only 1.25x it might well be worse than you. Keep in mind that the average safe human driver includes people that are tired, high, drunk, unlicensed, mentally ill, physically compromised, etc. While common, someone getting killed because someone is drunk or asleep is much more acceptable than having a computer make a mistake. If we want society as a whole to accept autonomous cars it's best to show a clear benefit to society, not just better than 51% of drivers.
• comeonseriously 6y ago
  I want to know who is responsible when the AI makes the wrong decision and someone gets hurt. I want that to be fleshed out first. Beyond that, if SDCs are even just as safe as HDCs, I'm good.
  • stkdump 6y ago
    > if SDCs are even just as safe as HDCs, I'm good You might be a safer driver than the average human driver, in which case a SDC increases risk for you personally (and overall, in case the less safe drivers keep using non-SDCs). In that regard, we should wait until SDCs are safer than almost all human drivers. Most drivers believe to be above average drivers, which is of course impossible. But there might be interesting correlations, for example with social status. Lower social status does disadvantage people in many regards. I am sure that insurance companies have data on the question if they have more (fatal) crashes as well. And it does stand to reason that people with higher social status drive newer and better cars as well, so we could end up with a situation where the better drivers are replaced by computers before the worse drivers. Interestingly, I think an ethics committee said a few years ago that once SDCs are safer than human drivers, it becomes a moral imperative to outlaw non-SDCs. I am wondering, if they will explore the human driving safety 'distribution' before inacting such rules. Waiting for the 5x margin could solve that problem, because then you will probably have SDCs that are safer than almost all human drivers, and it could be an incentive for companies working on the technology to get to that level faster, than they would in case they start selling them en masse earlier.
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  There will always be a long tail where the machines fail in scenarios a human can handle. We're just going to write off those deaths as an act of nature?
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  The big problem with numbers like this is how do you measure it? Tesla claims their system is vastly safer than human drivers, but currently it only engages in situations where it's already fairly safe to use. So should that system be 5 times safer than all human-driving, or safer than human-driving under the conditions the Tesla is able to engage?
• kstrauser 6y ago
  I have an older friend whose driving terrifies me, but who lives in an area with effectively zero public transportation or reliable cab service. While I don't want to see this person on the roads, the alternative is literally moving into a senior community (which would probably be the death of this person). Frankly, if self-driving cars became .75x as safe as the average human driver, it would still a net safety improvement if got this person out from behind the wheel.
  • LoSboccacc 6y ago
    I hate this mindset, lots people get killed by senior driver with impaired vision/reflexes and it's always the same bullshit "but it would kill him to take away his independence". well, tell that to people that will eventually be under his wheels.
    • kstrauser 6y ago
      I didn’t say it was OK. I’m not in a position to do anything about it, and my friend lives many states away. But as a practical matter, it they’re going to keep running errands and such, I’d infinitely rather they be doing it in a self-driving vehicle. I’d also suggest a little empathy for people in such a situation. “Taking away their independence” sounds so minor and practical, but often is basically a euphemism for “removing the sense of self-determination that allows them to stay alive”. It’s not as simple as saying “Old Joe shouldn’t drive anymore”, because the implications can be pretty severe. That doesn’t mean that it’s a great excuse for Joe to keep driving! But it does mean that there are some pretty big philosophical conversations to be had about it. And if/when self-driving cars come around, a lot of those drawbacks vanish in a puff of smoke. Then we can say, as a society, “we want you to keep just as much independence as you’ve always had! You just don’t need to be the one working the controls of the car anymore, but it’s still going to take you on every errand and friend visit you’d ever want to go on, and actually help you be even more capable.” That sounds pretty damn splendid to me.
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  I think the insurance companies will have a different and much more financially based standard. More importantly, I doubt NIH will trump that conglomerate and its influence on NHTSA Also, you could argue that restricting a technology that will result in 20% less deaths on the road is the opposite of the public health. To underline that, that is potentially 10,000 people in terms of death or major disfigurement. PER YEAR. And self-driving could be, in a targeted/situational manner FAR safer if it took drunk/drugged/tired drivers out of the equation, which are responsible for around 33% of deaths. If someone is drunk, a technology 2x an alert driver will be 10x a drunk driver.
• thedudeabides5 6y ago
  Maybe people want self-driving cars to be 5 times safer because they don't trust the people saying the cars are X times safer to begin with. Like you are testing how much they trust machines, and how much they trust the people telling them the machine is X% better. Given 2020, think a little skepticism on both/either is reasonable.
• manfredo 6y ago
  Why, though? Even in the case that it's the same safety self driving cars would yield huge productivity gains as people can work or sleep while commuting and truckers can have 1 or 2 self driving trucks following them cross country. And transportation for the elderly or disabled who cannot drive themselves.
• gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Costs aside, what about something like mag-lev tracks for cars, that can start/go on a dime, and on freeways go faster, even switch lanes to get around slower traffic. Maybe even do away w/ speed limits just go as fast as you 'feel safe' going with the only limit being the max. In cities you'd have sensors/grids everywhere to detect non-car traffic, and regular cars could even drive over the mag-lev, or it could be a separate track, and you can go in/out of mag-lev/drive modes. Maybe it parks you, til you're ready to take over control (say you're napping on the commute). Alarm goes up, you wake up. Stretch, even get out and stand up for a minute, get back in. Buckle up - drive the final block to where you want to park at your job, or if it's a country side location, up in the mountains, etc you might drive for longer then park where ever. Essentially you could just cover cities and highways to nearest gas stations. Car's running out of gas/electricity it routes itself to nearest depot. Going cross country and want to stop at lunch? Program the car, and it'll pull to nearest gas station in tim-buk-two and let you figure out where to go from there. Point: A/I self-driving aren't the only way to get autonomous cars. 50/50 re-thinking infrastructure, sensors, car-to-car communications could get us a lot closer faster.
• Zigurd 6y ago
  An oft overlooked factor in acceptance of AVs is that the evolution of technology from driver-assist to autonomy will alter perceptions: First, human drivers using driver assist will become safer "drivers" even though the added safety is properly the result of the technology that is evolving toward AVs. For example, it should become very difficult for a human driver to hit a pedestrian or cyclist. Not impossible. Just exceedingly unlikely to be the fault of the driver. Secondly, driver assist will habituate drivers and other road users to the performance characteristics of AV technology. The upshot is that AV technology will not be benchmarked against the way drivers and other road users behave and perform today. In some ways the expectations for incrementally better safety will be higher. In other ways, the "flavor" or road risks will change in a way that converges on how AVs perform.
• gamerDude 6y ago
  A lot of comments are focusing on safety via driving better. But with self-driving vehicles, can't we make the layout of the car safer, and thus accidents cause less harm to the people inside? For example, right now because we need to see the road, I assume there is significantly more danger from the windshield vs. a padded back on both sides of the car with passengers facing each other like in a train car. It seems likely that we can make self-driving vehicles much safer, even with the same number of collisions, by just changing the layout.
  • vernie 6y ago
    Maybe Tesla can revive Elon's "mini-sub" idea.
  • wlesieutre 6y ago
    For handling rapid deceleration, I think you’d be best off with seats facing the rear. A cushioned seat can distribute force much more evenly than a seatbelt when the car stops suddenly and your inertia wants to keep you going, and the backs could be reinforced to block anything coming into the passenger compartment from the collision. Hard to do that with a windshield.
    • e9 6y ago
      On top of facing the rear they can attach industrial spring to absorb the shock of the fast deceleration/collision
    • cogman10 6y ago
      After the crash is where I'd be concerned. While the windshield has a lot of negatives, one positive is that it's relatively easy to break and pull someone out of the car in a crash. IDK, probably still safer, but it's something that'd deserve some aggressive crash tests to make sure we aren't making a pinto mistake.
      • newacct583 6y ago
        Are a significant number of traffic fatalities currently avoided by pulling people out of vehicles through broken windshields? That seems a little overspecific to me. In fact, rear-facing seats are absolutely known to be safer (c.f. infant car seats), given that in all collisions one vehicle is almost by definition decelerating along its forward axis.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  One issue that is often overlooked is that humans are pretty robust to unforeseen situations vs AI. Take for example the recent fires in California and the smokey skies. Many of the cell phone pictures did a horrible job of capturing the photos, because their AI had been trained that the daytime sky is blue. And with such a failure, all the cars with similar software would be affected at once.
• Tade0 6y ago
  Here's how I think autonomous cars could be introduced, once they reach human-level safety: As a penalty for bad driving. I believe people would be much more accepting of machines taking the wheel if it meant that at least "this guy there" isn't driving.
  • philwelch 6y ago
    Fair is fair. If a self-driving car is a safer driver than John Doe, but we don’t allow that self-driving car on the road, perhaps we should revoke John Doe’s drivers’ license as well.
    • meekrohprocess 6y ago
      We absolutely should. But we should also have alternative ways for John Doe to get around without a car, and we don't. Car culture in the US has started to evoke that old saw: "If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem." Our society would be a lot better off if we regularly revoked the licenses of unsafe drivers. But the entire nation is designed around car ownership, so doing that today would be an unconscionable human rights violation.
      • chii 6y ago
        > But we should also have alternative ways for John Doe to get around without a car, and we don't. taxi/uber or public transport where available.
        • meekrohprocess 6y ago
          Where do you live that that is a viable option? Outside of super-dense urban centers, there is almost no public transit, and taxi/Uber rides are prohibitively expensive because of the distances involved. Outside of cities, it's not unusual to drive >100 miles on an average day. And that's on easy mode, when you don't have kids to ferry around.
  • 6y ago
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  Human beings need a target for vengeance and hatred. If someone kills your child, you can hate them. If an automated car kills your child, you don't have anyone to hate. Saying that this is about safety thresholds is a distraction from the true human problem exposed by automated cars: "Which individual will held accountable and risk jailtime if their car kills someone you love, and how can this individual be identified from the appropriate government registries within 24 hours of a death?" Until this is clearly defined in law, automated driving will continue to be resisted under any number of plausible justifications, and arguing with those justifications will have little effect.
  • chii 6y ago
    The owner of the autonomous car is/should be responsible.
    • SammyNameTaken 6y ago
      suppose you get framed by having a vulnerability in your vehicle getting exploited
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • floatingatoll 6y ago
        If, as the registered person, you were notified about the vulnerability and didn’t patch it, you could be convicted of criminal neglect at minimum, same as a driver who ignores a recall notice and continued driving.
    • floatingatoll 6y ago
      It’s less interesting to me who is registered as responsible, or what process is used to select that person. But if no specific single named individual is registered as personally liable without possibility of corporate liability shield, then we won’t get public acceptance of self-driving cars for a much longer time than could be possible.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• anfilt 6y ago
  Problem is your the average for human drivers is brought down mostly by bad drivers. However, even the if we talking about averages 50% of people are better than average. I would not feel to confident in a self driving car that is only approximately as good as 1 out of 2 drivers. I would want the car to be better than high upper percentile. Especially knowing an automated system can have reaction times that can put any humans reaction times to shame. So yes equal safety is far from enough. Especially considering 50% would be better drivers than a self driving car that was only as good as the average driver. Your asking 50% of people and some percentage of people who overestimate their abilities to trust a car that would perform worse than them.
  • newacct583 6y ago
    Most of your point is just the Lake Wobegon fallacy at work. Obviously you think you're not a below average driver. But everyone does, and lots of them are wrong. The part that isn't is that you're imagining a non-linear distribution where a significant fraction of accidents are the fault of these identifiable "bad drivers" and that the MEDIAN human driver is actually better than the average/median SDV. To which I ask: is there evidence for this? It's a new argument, and I haven't seen it made before.
    • anfilt 6y ago
      If a self driving car is only as good as the average driver then by definition 50% of people are a better. How is that a fallacy? It also could be considerably higher depending on the skew of the distribution. Depending how much bad drivers lower the average.
      • newacct583 6y ago
        That's not a fallacy, but it doesn't seem like an interesting point. Your comment above seemed deeper. Apologies if that's all you meant.
        • anfilt 6y ago
• scoot_718 6y ago
  Economically, people will not buy a car that sacrifices them in favour of others.
• howlgarnish 6y ago
  Misleading title. The article is not saying we need more than equal safety; it's saying that self-driven vehicles are perceived as more dangerous and people in the study wanted them to be 4-5x safer than human-driven vehicles to overcome this.
• enchiridion 6y ago
  How many people have the current SOTA systems killed?
• rkagerer 6y ago
  5x safer isn't an unreasonable threshold to ask for. All life-critical, engineered systems incorporate a safety margin. To win buy-in from the population at large, you sure as heck better have overwhelming statistics. Marginal just won't cut it. When you're talking about taking control away from the driver, all you need is one accident a human would have prevented to create political backlash and deteriorate trust in the system. Just because several other unvoiced lives may have been saved doesn't offer consolation to the victims or deem the loss acceptable. I think of it as analogous to the legal doctrine that convicting one innocent is worse than letting 10 guilty individuals go free. I'm always skeptical when developers claim a computer can do a better job than a human, as I've encountered so many edge cases the programming just never adequately accounted for. It will take time and a great deal of experience running these platforms in the wild until they become truly resilient. I would be quite pissed off to find the severed limb I suffered in a crash was due to programming not sufficiently distinguishing e.g. road paint from water streaks. And the metric you choose to define "safer" will never be perfect. Extra buffer helps offset any bias or gaps in your methodology and capture more of the long tail of "one-offs" never accounted for in version 1. I'm a big believer that driverless vehicles will provide huge improvements to our quality of life, I just feel there's a lot of misrepresentation taking place out there today as to how far along these systems are.
  • foreigner 6y ago
    Even ”overwhelming statistics" aren't enough, look at vaccines.
• morpheos137 6y ago
  What most people seem to misunderstand about "driving" is that it is not a sensory or stimulus response problem. It is a cognition problem. Computers or computer based "AI" are good at solving bounded problems that do not require open ended or on the fly model building and judgement exercising in real time. At this biological intelligence, honed by millions of years of selective evolution still excels. Computers can "solve" GO or Chess because fundamentally the rules are simple and the models required to play these games are subject to only a few, static constraints. Driving, in all conditions on all roads, on the other hand, requires a flexible model of the real world that approaches that built by sentient biological intelligences. The problem is not sensor or perception latency. Sure LIDAR can blow human perception out of the water. But that does not matter. What matters is making the correct decision based on sensory inputs using a high fidelity model of the real world. Computer does not understand the difference between two people playing catch by the roadside, parallel to the road and a situation where a child might be chasing after a soccer ball. This is not just combinatorics and probability...it is theory of mind. Thus until AGI is invented FSD will be a misnomer. Doesn't matter how much faster a computer can perceive if it does not know how to integrate the raw data it receives into a model of the world that yields correct decisions to the circumstances.