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Human life is sacred. Absolutely. but. If we are concerned with cars killing people, we should get rid of cars. This FUD around self-driving == killing people

Human life is sacred. Absolutely. but. If we are concerned with cars killing people, we should get rid of cars. This FUD around self-driving == killing people will, in the long-term, cause more deaths than the handful of sensationalized stories about self-driving deaths. The only reason those car crashes get national attention is because they were self-driving. In every other way they are boring. Bicyclists hit by car: every day. Man killed by semi: every day. etc. Do you think you'd see a bunch of FUD about a 2021 manually-driven Chevy mystery car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry? No. But: https://insideevs.com/news/333516/self-driving-chevrolet-bolt-reportedly-involved-in-accident-in-san-francisco/ https://insideevs.com/news/333516/self-driving-chevrolet-bol...

TameAntelope 6y ago
I'm concerned about being the donor of the red ink the subsequent regulation gets written in.
onion2k 6y ago
Does this mean that if I build an AI controlled gun turret to shoot people who walk across my lawn it shouldn't be news when it kills someone because people get shot by other people quite regularly? In my opinion the application of technology, and (more importantly) the delegation of human responsibility to a computer, should be something that's part of the national conversation.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Not the same. The people wouldn’t’ve gotten shot in the first place. The idea with self driving is that it’s safer than a human, not that people will die regardless. So in your scenario, unless you’re just shooting everyone that walks by for some weird reason, and your turret is less accurate, it’s not the same. Not arguing for either side.
akira2501 6y ago
> sensationalized stories about self-driving deaths. I disagree that they're sensationalized. Self-driving systems are designed to improve user safety, but when they end up making mistakes that human drivers _wouldn't_ make then it's appropriate to thoroughly investigate these systems. > is because they were self-driving. Well, precisely. We tolerate driving accidents because we know that the mobility that cars provide end up offering far more value to the world than the occasional accidents that we end up tolerating. What's the trade with self-driving cars? What is the technology enabling that is worth the possible additional risks? > car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry? I don't think that comparison offers anything interesting, and it ignores the long and storied history of improving automobile safety. Look into Ralph Naders "Unsafe At Any Speed" if you really want to see people looking at "regular" accidents and deciding there was something to be fixed.
- stjo 6y ago
  > human drivers _wouldn't_ make But human drivers make a lot of mistakes that computer drivers _wouldn't_. If it is safER than humans - it is better. No need to be perfect.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    And the way you establish safety is by doing a lot of miles with trained employees and clearly established liability, not by releasing alpha software to the untrained public with complete liability disclaimers.
  - stefan_ 6y ago
    Citation needed. So far, they have mostly driven into static obstacles on highways, the only environment where the vendors even allow to use their "self-driving" system because of the overwhelmingly favorable conditions.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    Yes, self-driving systems will have fewer deaths/distance driven and therefore be statistically safer than human drivers. But human drivers make human errors, understandable, explainable, common errors that we are used to, and therefore we underestimate their severity. Self-driving cars will make space-alien machine-logic crazy weird and definitely not human errors, they will cause fatalities in situations where any reasonable human wouldn't, and that is much scarier than human errors, and therefore we overestimate their severity. And that makes self-driving a very, very hard sell, it's simply not enough to be statistically better on just the numbers, you have to be psychologically better, and that's a huge hurdle.
tshaddox 6y ago
Another way to think about it is to ask how many lives could have been saved with this (or any other) system.
handedness 6y ago
For some, it feels different because of the potential scale. Watching Falcon Heavy boosters return in perfect unison is spooky in a way watching one Falcon 9 return isn't. Put another way, consider all the IT professionals who advise their relatives to wait a month or two before performing a major OS update. When self-driving cars are the majority of vehicles on the road, and we get our first buggy software update that results in a string of crashes, how likely will people be to update if they're even given a choice at all? Comparing human to self-driving per-mile fatality statistics like that's the primary measure for people, while ignoring the fact that we're looking at the first mainstream manifestations of a coming type of threat modeling that the species has never before had to even consider, seems a little narrow a way to view the issue. For insurance companies and actuaries looking to define collectivized risk, spreadsheets are the right way to consider this kind of thing. For individuals who've driven their whole lives without an accident, deciding to let emerging tech take over for you when taking the kids to visit grandma is going to be a significant transition in human history. Consider that there are very elderly people alive today who will still never fly on an airplane because of their early safety records.
Traster 6y ago
This ridiculous assertion any self-driving == better than humna is just ridiculous too. This is a website selling a self-driving devkit with a big "buy it now" sign that also has a disclaimer saying "Well you're not really buying it, if you kill someone, we've never met". Sure, self-driving cars that were better than humans would be good, but what we have right now is self-driving cars that are maybe better than humans in normal conditions (controlling for type of car, conditions etc), and completely break down in bad conditions and often fail unsafe in between. >Do you think you'd see a bunch of FUD about a 2021 manually-driven Chevy mystery car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry? No. Well of course not, because we all moved to self-driving cars in 2017 as Elon Musk told us we would. There's a very simple reason we aren't worried if Bob down the road crashes his car, it's because we're not binary identical bob, and people haven't been systematically lying about bob's capabilities for the last decade.
- tim333 6y ago
  I don't think many people assert self driving is better than human driving presently. But as technology advances it may well become so.
blub 6y ago
Like I've said before, I don't have any problem if those that want to accelerate humanity's progress in this area volunteer themselves and their families to be self-driving test dummies. I'd even support the idea of building them statues, should they meet an unfortunate hero's end.
kelnos 6y ago
If they can prove fewer crashes/deaths with their system than with human drivers, then perhaps they'll have something. But with only 35 million miles driven, they don't have enough data to prove much of anything.

TameAntelope 6y ago

I'm concerned about being the donor of the red ink the subsequent regulation gets written in.

onion2k 6y ago

Does this mean that if I build an AI controlled gun turret to shoot people who walk across my lawn it shouldn't be news when it kills someone because people get shot by other people quite regularly? In my opinion the application of technology, and (more importantly) the delegation of human responsibility to a computer, should be something that's part of the national conversation.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Not the same. The people wouldn’t’ve gotten shot in the first place. The idea with self driving is that it’s safer than a human, not that people will die regardless. So in your scenario, unless you’re just shooting everyone that walks by for some weird reason, and your turret is less accurate, it’s not the same. Not arguing for either side.

akira2501 6y ago

> sensationalized stories about self-driving deaths. I disagree that they're sensationalized. Self-driving systems are designed to improve user safety, but when they end up making mistakes that human drivers _wouldn't_ make then it's appropriate to thoroughly investigate these systems. > is because they were self-driving. Well, precisely. We tolerate driving accidents because we know that the mobility that cars provide end up offering far more value to the world than the occasional accidents that we end up tolerating. What's the trade with self-driving cars? What is the technology enabling that is worth the possible additional risks? > car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry? I don't think that comparison offers anything interesting, and it ignores the long and storied history of improving automobile safety. Look into Ralph Naders "Unsafe At Any Speed" if you really want to see people looking at "regular" accidents and deciding there was something to be fixed.

stjo 6y ago
> human drivers _wouldn't_ make But human drivers make a lot of mistakes that computer drivers _wouldn't_. If it is safER than humans - it is better. No need to be perfect.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  And the way you establish safety is by doing a lot of miles with trained employees and clearly established liability, not by releasing alpha software to the untrained public with complete liability disclaimers.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  Citation needed. So far, they have mostly driven into static obstacles on highways, the only environment where the vendors even allow to use their "self-driving" system because of the overwhelmingly favorable conditions.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  Yes, self-driving systems will have fewer deaths/distance driven and therefore be statistically safer than human drivers. But human drivers make human errors, understandable, explainable, common errors that we are used to, and therefore we underestimate their severity. Self-driving cars will make space-alien machine-logic crazy weird and definitely not human errors, they will cause fatalities in situations where any reasonable human wouldn't, and that is much scarier than human errors, and therefore we overestimate their severity. And that makes self-driving a very, very hard sell, it's simply not enough to be statistically better on just the numbers, you have to be psychologically better, and that's a huge hurdle.

tshaddox 6y ago

Another way to think about it is to ask how many lives could have been saved with this (or any other) system.

handedness 6y ago

For some, it feels different because of the potential scale. Watching Falcon Heavy boosters return in perfect unison is spooky in a way watching one Falcon 9 return isn't. Put another way, consider all the IT professionals who advise their relatives to wait a month or two before performing a major OS update. When self-driving cars are the majority of vehicles on the road, and we get our first buggy software update that results in a string of crashes, how likely will people be to update if they're even given a choice at all? Comparing human to self-driving per-mile fatality statistics like that's the primary measure for people, while ignoring the fact that we're looking at the first mainstream manifestations of a coming type of threat modeling that the species has never before had to even consider, seems a little narrow a way to view the issue. For insurance companies and actuaries looking to define collectivized risk, spreadsheets are the right way to consider this kind of thing. For individuals who've driven their whole lives without an accident, deciding to let emerging tech take over for you when taking the kids to visit grandma is going to be a significant transition in human history. Consider that there are very elderly people alive today who will still never fly on an airplane because of their early safety records.

Traster 6y ago

This ridiculous assertion any self-driving == better than humna is just ridiculous too. This is a website selling a self-driving devkit with a big "buy it now" sign that also has a disclaimer saying "Well you're not really buying it, if you kill someone, we've never met". Sure, self-driving cars that were better than humans would be good, but what we have right now is self-driving cars that are maybe better than humans in normal conditions (controlling for type of car, conditions etc), and completely break down in bad conditions and often fail unsafe in between. >Do you think you'd see a bunch of FUD about a 2021 manually-driven Chevy mystery car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry? No. Well of course not, because we all moved to self-driving cars in 2017 as Elon Musk told us we would. There's a very simple reason we aren't worried if Bob down the road crashes his car, it's because we're not binary identical bob, and people haven't been systematically lying about bob's capabilities for the last decade.

tim333 6y ago
I don't think many people assert self driving is better than human driving presently. But as technology advances it may well become so.

blub 6y ago

Like I've said before, I don't have any problem if those that want to accelerate humanity's progress in this area volunteer themselves and their families to be self-driving test dummies. I'd even support the idea of building them statues, should they meet an unfortunate hero's end.

kelnos 6y ago

If they can prove fewer crashes/deaths with their system than with human drivers, then perhaps they'll have something. But with only 35 million miles driven, they don't have enough data to prove much of anything.