4 ms·

There are an insane amount of car accident-related deaths & injuries every year. At least 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone. Because humans drive tired, drunk

There are an insane amount of car accident-related deaths & injuries every year. At least 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone. Because humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc, and sometimes just make mistakes. With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Even if we still have 10-20k deaths/year from automated driving systems, that's still a large improvement. This argument about the ethics of contrived car accident scenarios totally misses the boat. In my opinion the only ethical argument is to move over to fully automated driving systems as soon as -safely- possible.

riffic 6y ago
you've described crimes and bad decision making processes (humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc, and sometimes just make mistakes). The outcomes of those choices are known and have causes which are preventable; they are by definition not accidental in nature. I know it's not intentional but words matter. Crash is a better word 99% of the time than "accident".
- chipgap98 6y ago
  An accident is just something that occurs without intention. In the cases you're describing people don't intend to hit another car or person. That makes accident a reasonable label.
  - riffic 6y ago
    Behaviors and design are themselves an intention. This post addresses "The Semantics of Intention": https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_violence_language.php https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol... excerpt: Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in? UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths. Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%. "The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk." According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building." City officials have stated clearly that L.A.'s mission to eliminate traffic deaths is informed by the fact that "underserved communities are disproportionately killed in traffic crashes." But Yi argues that the historic neglect of those communities can be viewed as intentional. "To take that away, I think, is really not looking at some of the most disinvested communities and what they're going through," he said. "To put it squarely on the shoulders of drivers and say it's their fault and they're the ones who should be moderating behavior is overlooking the situation altogether."
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I agree with that, but I think "accident" in this particular context has the undesirable property of allowing people to weasel out of taking responsibility. Just because you didn't intend to do something, it doesn't make it not your fault if you do. But the system and culture around this is set up to try to disclaim blame, even to the point that insurance companies tell you to never ever admit you were at fault after a crash.
jonathanyc 6y ago
> With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological. The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  Nothing in my comment implied this will happen soon. I don't think a safe, fully automated system will arrive anytime soon. What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen. I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
  - jonathanyc 6y ago
    But the other commenter’s “corporations will kill people without consequences” isn’t a contrived example. It is just an extrapolation of what happened already when Uber’s self driving car killed a woman because the management and executives decided to manually disable the automatic braking on the car. Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I feel like you're moving the goalposts, though. My view is that even if self-driving car corporations kill people with zero consequences (due to poor laws and poor oversight), as long as they're doing so at lower rates than human drivers are, that's still a net win. It's still not an ideal scenario, because those deaths could be further reduced under the threat of real consequences. But by and large, it'd still be better than what we have today. If they're killing people during testing of experimental tech that hasn't been approved for general use (like the Uber case you mentioned), they need to be smacked down hard. If they're killing people at a higher rate than human drivers, they should not be approved for general use in the first place. If they're approved, but release an update that ends up killing more people, they again need to be smacked down hard, with the update immediately reverted.
lm28469 6y ago
> Because humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc, But I don't. I don't care about 30k deaths a year if I'm killed by a floating point exception or an image reconnaissance glitch making my car think the truck in front of me is part of the sky.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  And I care about dying from being hit by lightning and airplane crashes. It's statistically so unlikely that it's ridiculous to worry about it. If you die from a car crash it doesn't matter if it was from a drunk driver or an ai glitch. What matters is which is more likely- and humans are assholes. It will be orders of magnitude more likely to die by a human's hand than a random glitch. > "But I don't" I'm glad. Crashes still happen even when 1 party practices defensive driving techniques. Driving sucks.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    nah. it sounds like you’re arguing what the odds are but let me ask a question: what are the odds that a self driving car has a “glitch”? At what threshold should one be willing to bet their lives in this probability every time they drive? Right now we are speculating what the odds a self driving car has to make a mistake. But there aren’t any truly self driving car out there. So how do you determine the actual odds? If you replaced all the cars with self driving cars how many accidents would we have?
    - andrewzah 6y ago
      We're not there yet, but at some point we will be. It probably won't be within the next 5 years, maybe even 10. All that matters is that the # of deaths from automated driving ends up less than the # of deaths from human driving. If 1,000 people a year die from software glitches, that's still a 30x+ improvement from the current situation. I really don't see how people focus so much on "potential glitches" and not the current reality: drunk drivers, angry/hostile road-ragey people, people on the phone, people texting while driving, people on medication, people driving while sleepy, etc. A few glitches here and there is objectively superior to the current state of affairs.

riffic 6y ago

you've described crimes and bad decision making processes (humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc, and sometimes just make mistakes). The outcomes of those choices are known and have causes which are preventable; they are by definition not accidental in nature. I know it's not intentional but words matter. Crash is a better word 99% of the time than "accident".

chipgap98 6y ago
An accident is just something that occurs without intention. In the cases you're describing people don't intend to hit another car or person. That makes accident a reasonable label.
- riffic 6y ago
  Behaviors and design are themselves an intention. This post addresses "The Semantics of Intention": https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_violence_language.php https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol... excerpt: Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in? UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths. Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%. "The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk." According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building." City officials have stated clearly that L.A.'s mission to eliminate traffic deaths is informed by the fact that "underserved communities are disproportionately killed in traffic crashes." But Yi argues that the historic neglect of those communities can be viewed as intentional. "To take that away, I think, is really not looking at some of the most disinvested communities and what they're going through," he said. "To put it squarely on the shoulders of drivers and say it's their fault and they're the ones who should be moderating behavior is overlooking the situation altogether."
- kelnos 6y ago
  I agree with that, but I think "accident" in this particular context has the undesirable property of allowing people to weasel out of taking responsibility. Just because you didn't intend to do something, it doesn't make it not your fault if you do. But the system and culture around this is set up to try to disclaim blame, even to the point that insurance companies tell you to never ever admit you were at fault after a crash.

jonathanyc 6y ago

> With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological. The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.

andrewzah 6y ago
Nothing in my comment implied this will happen soon. I don't think a safe, fully automated system will arrive anytime soon. What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen. I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
- jonathanyc 6y ago
  But the other commenter’s “corporations will kill people without consequences” isn’t a contrived example. It is just an extrapolation of what happened already when Uber’s self driving car killed a woman because the management and executives decided to manually disable the automatic braking on the car. Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I feel like you're moving the goalposts, though. My view is that even if self-driving car corporations kill people with zero consequences (due to poor laws and poor oversight), as long as they're doing so at lower rates than human drivers are, that's still a net win. It's still not an ideal scenario, because those deaths could be further reduced under the threat of real consequences. But by and large, it'd still be better than what we have today. If they're killing people during testing of experimental tech that hasn't been approved for general use (like the Uber case you mentioned), they need to be smacked down hard. If they're killing people at a higher rate than human drivers, they should not be approved for general use in the first place. If they're approved, but release an update that ends up killing more people, they again need to be smacked down hard, with the update immediately reverted.

lm28469 6y ago

> Because humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc, But I don't. I don't care about 30k deaths a year if I'm killed by a floating point exception or an image reconnaissance glitch making my car think the truck in front of me is part of the sky.

andrewzah 6y ago
And I care about dying from being hit by lightning and airplane crashes. It's statistically so unlikely that it's ridiculous to worry about it. If you die from a car crash it doesn't matter if it was from a drunk driver or an ai glitch. What matters is which is more likely- and humans are assholes. It will be orders of magnitude more likely to die by a human's hand than a random glitch. > "But I don't" I'm glad. Crashes still happen even when 1 party practices defensive driving techniques. Driving sucks.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  nah. it sounds like you’re arguing what the odds are but let me ask a question: what are the odds that a self driving car has a “glitch”? At what threshold should one be willing to bet their lives in this probability every time they drive? Right now we are speculating what the odds a self driving car has to make a mistake. But there aren’t any truly self driving car out there. So how do you determine the actual odds? If you replaced all the cars with self driving cars how many accidents would we have?
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    We're not there yet, but at some point we will be. It probably won't be within the next 5 years, maybe even 10. All that matters is that the # of deaths from automated driving ends up less than the # of deaths from human driving. If 1,000 people a year die from software glitches, that's still a 30x+ improvement from the current situation. I really don't see how people focus so much on "potential glitches" and not the current reality: drunk drivers, angry/hostile road-ragey people, people on the phone, people texting while driving, people on medication, people driving while sleepy, etc. A few glitches here and there is objectively superior to the current state of affairs.