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>> The challenge remains that people will be killed in accidents involving autonomous control. While that's almost certainly true (and depending on one's inter

by wffurr 6y ago

>> The challenge remains that people will be killed in accidents involving autonomous control. While that's almost certainly true (and depending on one's interpretation of autonomous is already true), some people already believe that zero deaths in transport is possible: https://visionzeronetwork.org/about/what-is-vision-zero/ https://visionzeronetwork.org/about/what-is-vision-zero/. If it's possible to hold human drivers to that standard, why not autonomous systems as well?

bryanlarsen 6y ago
That was my original hope for self-driving cars. The easiest way to ensure that you don't kill anybody is to limit your speed to 20mph. At and below that speed a car-pedestrian collision is highly unlikely to result in a dead pedestrian. Also, at 20mph you can stop on a dime. So I imagined a large fleet of robot cars traveling at 20mph and normalizing that speed, forcing human drivers to slow down too. But it turns out that self-driving vendors spend a lot of effort on "driving like a human", which includes driving faster than the speed limit and faster than vision zero would allow on shared streets & roads.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Which could be done today. The vast majority of people obviously don't consider that acceptable in general.
riversflow 6y ago
Well that’s a silly vision. I have a vision of immortality too. This is a textbook example perfect being the enemy of good. I don’t want to hold any system to the standard of zero fatalities, and further I think this is why “shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll land amongst the stars” is faulty. People waste an exorbitant amount of time and fossil fuels commuting in passenger vehicles. Anything that significantly changes that balance should be considered. Progress is progress and letting everybody use the time they used to spend commuting is certainly progress.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  You're mocking as silly a vision that some places have already achieved. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-and-oslo-cut-pedestrian-deaths-to-zero https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-a...
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    Putting low income brackets into mass transit isn't a great vision to have. No wonder Norway had an uptick of suicides and drug related deaths in 2018
    - wffurr 6y ago
      Clean, fast, efficient, reliable mass transit for everyone is such a totalitarian nightmare. It's just awful.
      - LoSboccacc 6y ago
        It is, you only haven't realized it yet. there's zero chance mass transit can accommodate people's needs, even if you somehow solve the shopping issue with local markets and fixed item prices, the job<>house graph will always look like a fractal set of overlapping stars. cars is one of the most important social equalizer of this and last century. it allows people from basically all social status to move themselves, their family and their belongings at any time in full autonomy, enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places. private cars win over public transit because it's a better product. the only way for public transit to compete is to mandate laws to make cars comparatively a worse product, which is fundamentally anticompetitive - once public transit become monopolistic, once the company owns a tract, they can abuse their position deciding pricing and timetables. even in traffic, private cars offer a better experience: people are in their own space, under a roof from start to finish, with their preferred temperature and away from both obnoxious or influenced people. forcing mass transit trough legislation will surely have some short term benefits, but also: - more class divide between the richs, that will always be able to afford a car, and the poors who won't - massive gentrification of well connected areas, while the poors get pushed out to where service is of less quality - dependency of the poors to expensive third party services on any occasion they need to move themselves or their goods across a non serviced destination. rentals is not an option: rentals need a credit card, and guess who don't own one? - dependency on public transit times. have an unusual work shift or need to visit parents? get prepared to wait in the open under the cold or rain. need to get your child out of school in a down hour because he's suddenly ill? too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. of course there's situation where mass transit gets convenient, like large cities where a significant percentage of the population shares the same source/destination points, at which point people will use it naturally on their own. opposing private transit is going to destroy an important achievement of modern society, the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is. market, after all, need customer flexibility not to be captured. Safety is something to be solved with more safe cars and better technology all around. it'd be like discovering tomorrow that soap pollutes: some will want to force everyone to smell, some will create a better soap.

by wffurr 6y ago

bryanlarsen 6y ago

That was my original hope for self-driving cars. The easiest way to ensure that you don't kill anybody is to limit your speed to 20mph. At and below that speed a car-pedestrian collision is highly unlikely to result in a dead pedestrian. Also, at 20mph you can stop on a dime. So I imagined a large fleet of robot cars traveling at 20mph and normalizing that speed, forcing human drivers to slow down too. But it turns out that self-driving vendors spend a lot of effort on "driving like a human", which includes driving faster than the speed limit and faster than vision zero would allow on shared streets & roads.

ghaff 6y ago
Which could be done today. The vast majority of people obviously don't consider that acceptable in general.

riversflow 6y ago

Well that’s a silly vision. I have a vision of immortality too. This is a textbook example perfect being the enemy of good. I don’t want to hold any system to the standard of zero fatalities, and further I think this is why “shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll land amongst the stars” is faulty. People waste an exorbitant amount of time and fossil fuels commuting in passenger vehicles. Anything that significantly changes that balance should be considered. Progress is progress and letting everybody use the time they used to spend commuting is certainly progress.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
You're mocking as silly a vision that some places have already achieved. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-and-oslo-cut-pedestrian-deaths-to-zero https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-a...
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  Putting low income brackets into mass transit isn't a great vision to have. No wonder Norway had an uptick of suicides and drug related deaths in 2018
  - wffurr 6y ago
    Clean, fast, efficient, reliable mass transit for everyone is such a totalitarian nightmare. It's just awful.
    - LoSboccacc 6y ago
      It is, you only haven't realized it yet. there's zero chance mass transit can accommodate people's needs, even if you somehow solve the shopping issue with local markets and fixed item prices, the job<>house graph will always look like a fractal set of overlapping stars. cars is one of the most important social equalizer of this and last century. it allows people from basically all social status to move themselves, their family and their belongings at any time in full autonomy, enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places. private cars win over public transit because it's a better product. the only way for public transit to compete is to mandate laws to make cars comparatively a worse product, which is fundamentally anticompetitive - once public transit become monopolistic, once the company owns a tract, they can abuse their position deciding pricing and timetables. even in traffic, private cars offer a better experience: people are in their own space, under a roof from start to finish, with their preferred temperature and away from both obnoxious or influenced people. forcing mass transit trough legislation will surely have some short term benefits, but also: - more class divide between the richs, that will always be able to afford a car, and the poors who won't - massive gentrification of well connected areas, while the poors get pushed out to where service is of less quality - dependency of the poors to expensive third party services on any occasion they need to move themselves or their goods across a non serviced destination. rentals is not an option: rentals need a credit card, and guess who don't own one? - dependency on public transit times. have an unusual work shift or need to visit parents? get prepared to wait in the open under the cold or rain. need to get your child out of school in a down hour because he's suddenly ill? too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. of course there's situation where mass transit gets convenient, like large cities where a significant percentage of the population shares the same source/destination points, at which point people will use it naturally on their own. opposing private transit is going to destroy an important achievement of modern society, the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is. market, after all, need customer flexibility not to be captured. Safety is something to be solved with more safe cars and better technology all around. it'd be like discovering tomorrow that soap pollutes: some will want to force everyone to smell, some will create a better soap.