4 ms·

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

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?
- jrockway 6y ago
  Indeed. Why would 1.00000001x safer not be a no-brainer?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Because human lives are not fungible. If some guy somewhere else was gonna die and you make an intervention where I'm more likely to die then that doesn't work for me. I will oppose it to the end of my being (after all, the alternative is the end of my being). That is, if you take all the deaths from sleepy drivers, drunk drivers, angry drivers and replace them with random chance then I can no longer increase my chances of survival by not driving at night, not driving on holidays, not driving during commute hours, and avoiding shoals. Instead now you've taken my ability to increase survival and moved it into the base rate. Nope, I think I'd accept maybe a thousand other arbitrary people dying before I'd accept myself dying.
    - nmca 6y ago
      Sure, but in a democratic system with perfect information you should expect to lose the vote on your hypothetical "me vs 1000" trolley problem right? And in the absence of perfect information you'd I guess you'd mount a special interest lobby and hope for the best...
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        If it were me vs random one thousand and obviously so, yes. But fortunately, the Wobegon Effect makes it so that anyone can conceive of themselves being me (or even better, of themselves being better than me - considering I'm not particularly a safe driver). It is precisely because it is democratic then that makes it possible for any individual to exploit human cognitive errors. An authoritarian meritocracy would not fall for those tricks.
        dash2 6y ago
        It sounds like you agree that 1.0001 is a no-brainer, but that democracies may be tricked into rejecting it.
- ianhorn 6y ago
  Why don’t we mandate that people submit themselves to a mandatory medical experimentation lottery? We’ll do so much better if we go through as many people as we do lab rats, and it’ll save unimaginable lives in the long run. Utilitarianism via taking current lives to save future lives is the wrong perspective here.
  - dash2 6y ago
    There may be good reasons for the approach the article suggests, but this is not one of them. Nobody takes any lives, and there is no question here about experimentation. This is not a trolley experiment. It is a choice of two regulatory regimes. Under both of them, some people will die. If we choose the regime "ban self-driving cars until they are five times safer", then more people will die.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Ordinary people vote for the politicians who make the rules. How do you propose we get around their wishes?
- sreekotay 6y ago
  Agree. 5X is probably too high... butttt... let's set the terms. We can adjust the price as we move forward?

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?
jrockway 6y ago
Indeed. Why would 1.00000001x safer not be a no-brainer?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Because human lives are not fungible. If some guy somewhere else was gonna die and you make an intervention where I'm more likely to die then that doesn't work for me. I will oppose it to the end of my being (after all, the alternative is the end of my being). That is, if you take all the deaths from sleepy drivers, drunk drivers, angry drivers and replace them with random chance then I can no longer increase my chances of survival by not driving at night, not driving on holidays, not driving during commute hours, and avoiding shoals. Instead now you've taken my ability to increase survival and moved it into the base rate. Nope, I think I'd accept maybe a thousand other arbitrary people dying before I'd accept myself dying.
  - nmca 6y ago
    Sure, but in a democratic system with perfect information you should expect to lose the vote on your hypothetical "me vs 1000" trolley problem right? And in the absence of perfect information you'd I guess you'd mount a special interest lobby and hope for the best...
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      If it were me vs random one thousand and obviously so, yes. But fortunately, the Wobegon Effect makes it so that anyone can conceive of themselves being me (or even better, of themselves being better than me - considering I'm not particularly a safe driver). It is precisely because it is democratic then that makes it possible for any individual to exploit human cognitive errors. An authoritarian meritocracy would not fall for those tricks.
      - dash2 6y ago
        It sounds like you agree that 1.0001 is a no-brainer, but that democracies may be tricked into rejecting it.
ianhorn 6y ago
Why don’t we mandate that people submit themselves to a mandatory medical experimentation lottery? We’ll do so much better if we go through as many people as we do lab rats, and it’ll save unimaginable lives in the long run. Utilitarianism via taking current lives to save future lives is the wrong perspective here.
- dash2 6y ago
  There may be good reasons for the approach the article suggests, but this is not one of them. Nobody takes any lives, and there is no question here about experimentation. This is not a trolley experiment. It is a choice of two regulatory regimes. Under both of them, some people will die. If we choose the regime "ban self-driving cars until they are five times safer", then more people will die.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
Ordinary people vote for the politicians who make the rules. How do you propose we get around their wishes?
sreekotay 6y ago
Agree. 5X is probably too high... butttt... let's set the terms. We can adjust the price as we move forward?