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In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the ti

In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he was talking to much to hear the train. The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off. Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road.

glofish 5y ago
that's not quite right. Computers currently are far worse than the good drivers out there. It is not clear if they ever could be better than a trained and cautious driver. For example you can easily avoid the situation above by not talking on the phone while driving across rails. if the AI abruptly crosses the median how are you going to avoid that?
mrtksn 5y ago
People are great at some things that computers suck and computers are great at some things that human suck. Machines doing horrible mistakes that no conscious person would ever do is problematic because we don’t have reliable error correction methods for that kind of mistakes. A FSD car will never accidentally press acceleration pedal whey trying to press the brakes or loose control when trying to read an SMS. Instead it will mistake a bird for a train, hit and run someone and it would be like “something slowed me down, are my batteries degrading?” How do you deal with a driver that fails to understand what’s going on?
admax88q 5y ago
If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll stick to manual driving. Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.
- legolas2412 5y ago
  Hell, it needs to be better than you with a "train is coming, I'm going to slow down" driver assistance. If you tell me that no such driver assistance exists, just apply it to scenarios where it exists, like lane keep assists and automatic emergency assists
- andy81 5y ago
  Not a problem if you only sell to the bottom 50% of drivers.
  - alexanderchr 5y ago
    Only a small minority of drivers consider themselves to be in the bottom 50% of drivers, so you might have trouble with that strategy.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  It would be interesting to put a black box in a car tied to the driver. Anyone who shows patterns of driving worse than average gets a self driving car. If you are better than average you can keep your dumb car.
- okareaman 5y ago
  How many people on Hacker News think self-driving cars will be a better driver than themselves in the near future?
  - admax88q 5y ago
    I'm sure almost nobody even outside HN thinks that self driving cars will be better than themselves. Everybody thinks they're above average drivers. That's a psychological problem that self-driving cars will have to overcome. They need to be so obviously better than any human driver for people to actually consider them. A handful of fatal accidents that people think they could have avoided as a driver and they won't want to get on board. People are bad at risk assessment, but that's a fact of life. As a result, self driving has to be better than what people _perceive_ as their risk of being in an accident while driving, not what the actual risk may be.
  - tristor 5y ago
    Honestly, I don't think self-driving cars will /ever/ be a better driver than I am. But that also hinges on what you mean by "better". There may reach a point in time when self-driving cars have a lower statistical likelihood of being in an accident than I am, but I doubt that they will ever do that while getting me to my destination more quickly than I do. Both of those things relate to the fact that I have significantly better situational awareness and driver training than the vast majority of people, including significant time on track racing cars. To match my situational awareness it will not be enough for self-driving cars to rely on their own sensors, but they will need to communicate with one another and act in concert, otherwise my reading of traffic patterns and looking far ahead in the distance will always beat it out for the quickest path through traffic, or the safest response. To me, where I see a benefit for myself personally, is that self-driving cars don't necessarily need to be better than me, they just need to be better than most, and turn driving from an active to a passive activity. It means I can be engaged in other things. But, that's also the rub. I /like/ driving, so I don't want to exist in a world where I am /forced/ to have a self-driving car to use the roads, as I still want the ability to go out and enjoy myself from time to time. But for a daily commute, turning driving into a passive activity would make me a happier and more productive person (other people are horrendous drivers and it frustrates me observing their unsafe and careless behaviors).
- Hydraulix989 5y ago
  Does the average driver even look both ways at the railroad crossing? I do every single time. Such a low-cost preventative measure that could very well end up saving my life one day.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    At least where I learned to drive, not only was stopping to look both ways at railroad crossings taught in driving classes at school, it was part of the written test to get a permit/license, as well.
f6v 5y ago
Now look at AstraZeneca craze. Vaccines save lives, thrombosis cases are extremely rare. Yet the guy on street is talking to someone on the phone: “Do not take AZ! I repeat: do not take AZ!!!”. Technology has to make just one mistake to lose layman’s confidence.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road. And yet there is no evidence that computers are better drivers than people are. I do have to ask, are we using the same computers? I've been using them for decades, and they're consistently buggy, error prone and straight-up factually wrong a lot of the time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
simias 5y ago
Even if you're right, that's the same argument for airplane safety. The problem is being in control versus putting your hands in the hands of an unknown third party. The psychological, ethical and legal implications are completely different. If tomorrow I drive a car and run a kid over then I'll be in trouble and you'll probably never hear about it. If tomorrow I get in my Tesla self-driving car and it runs a kid over then you'll hear about it everywhere and Tesla's responsibility will be invoked. Because whose else? The bar for self driving cars is not being as good (or bad) as a human driver, they need to be orders of magnitude safer in all situations. They need to have airplane industry numbers, not Average Joe drunk driving numbers.
joe_the_user 5y ago
A human being can drive a million miles without a serious accident. 2018 saw 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven[1]. Human beings are extremely good at driving safely overall. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  Yeah, I think people conflate seeing people drive erratically or doing dumb things in cars with an inability to operate a car in a way that ultimately prevents deaths. Humans are incredibly good at that in the bigger picture for reasons that are currently impossible to replicate with a computer. Criticize human driving all you want, but even the worst of us can typically manage to get from point a to point b... Somehow.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    One of the eye-opening things about the wikipedia statistics is that advent and universality of mobile phones at worst caused a very small uptick in fatalities. With all the bullshit you see with on the road, somehow people manage to mostly avoid death doing it. My guess is people can pull attention back to the road at moments it's really needed.
    - steve_adams_86 5y ago
      For sure. Well, humans don't really need to make great decisions individually to be protected, ultimately, by most people making an effort not to kill or be killed – to some degree at least. It's a very strange and fascinating thing about us. I mean, that industrial agriculture eventually results in food on tables across the globe. So many systems at work. Run by the same people using their smart phones in their cars, haha. We manage to collectively make things happen. Easy to criticize, but hard to argue against the results?
- cameronh90 5y ago
  Yet driving deaths are the leading cause of death in older children and young adults. It's not that we're bad at driving, I suppose, it's that we do an awful lot of it and it's quite a risky activity - especially if you're not 100% engaged. That being said, if the US cared about road safety, there's quite a lot they could do to improve it already. Many techniques have been used successfully in other countries to significantly reduce road deaths, for example, a nationwide vehicle safety inspection standard and lowering speeds on urban roads. The fact that these aren't being done leads me to think the concerns about road safety are actually rather irrelevant for the country as a whole. When self driving cars exist and are convenient, people probably will switch to them, as long as the accident rate is vaguely comparable.
jandrese 5y ago
Self driving cars would have to kill over 1.35 million people each year to be as bad as human drivers[1]. But there is no reason we should be happy if a self driving technology "only" kills 1.2 million people in a year. That number is absurd and should not be considered acceptable. I think in the semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick, something only to be attempted by professionals or in limited circumstances like pulling into a field to park or some other low speed maneuvering. [1] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
- okareaman 5y ago
  > semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick totally agree but I'm skeptical of current tech to get there in the near time frame being talked about. It's all in how you define semi-distant
- gpm 5y ago
  We should be delighted if we have a self driving technology that only kills 1.2 million people a year. 1. That's an incredible amount of saved time, people now get that time back that they use to have to spend driving. We would have eliminated the largest suck of human time on the planet (truck driving). Etc. The main benefit of self driving is not safety. 2. We have a working baseline that we can improve upon to drive that number down, and since computer programs don't have the "new drivers need to learn from scratch" problem, those improvements will stick around approximately forever.
- matz1 5y ago
  Hell, I would happy if self driving cars only kills 1.5 (slightly more) million people each car.
toast0 5y ago
> Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road. Computers are better than some drivers, but they're worse than others. If the goal is safety, computerized assistance is almost certainly better than self driving. Keeping the human driver engaged and doing their best, but having the computer supervising works a lot better than having the human supervising; it's hard for a human to remain alert enough to intervene quickly enough when needed. I don't know if there are good studies yet, but I expect automatic emergency braking to reduce severity of a lot of collissions. Cross traffic warnings probably eliminates a lot of minor (and some major) collisions. There are systems now to detect wakefulness; if those are combined with something to safely pull over and stop, that could reduce a lot of tragic collisions as well.
- totetsu 5y ago
  > If the goal is safety If the goal was safety, a computer assisting a competent driver would be the best. If the goal is private profits for a few individuals, then a computer that doesn't take a paycheck would be best.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Unclear. There's some level of computer driving competence where humans will simply zone out.

glofish 5y ago

that's not quite right. Computers currently are far worse than the good drivers out there. It is not clear if they ever could be better than a trained and cautious driver. For example you can easily avoid the situation above by not talking on the phone while driving across rails. if the AI abruptly crosses the median how are you going to avoid that?

mrtksn 5y ago

People are great at some things that computers suck and computers are great at some things that human suck. Machines doing horrible mistakes that no conscious person would ever do is problematic because we don’t have reliable error correction methods for that kind of mistakes. A FSD car will never accidentally press acceleration pedal whey trying to press the brakes or loose control when trying to read an SMS. Instead it will mistake a bird for a train, hit and run someone and it would be like “something slowed me down, are my batteries degrading?” How do you deal with a driver that fails to understand what’s going on?

admax88q 5y ago

If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll stick to manual driving. Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.

legolas2412 5y ago
Hell, it needs to be better than you with a "train is coming, I'm going to slow down" driver assistance. If you tell me that no such driver assistance exists, just apply it to scenarios where it exists, like lane keep assists and automatic emergency assists
andy81 5y ago
Not a problem if you only sell to the bottom 50% of drivers.
- alexanderchr 5y ago
  Only a small minority of drivers consider themselves to be in the bottom 50% of drivers, so you might have trouble with that strategy.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
It would be interesting to put a black box in a car tied to the driver. Anyone who shows patterns of driving worse than average gets a self driving car. If you are better than average you can keep your dumb car.
okareaman 5y ago
How many people on Hacker News think self-driving cars will be a better driver than themselves in the near future?
- admax88q 5y ago
  I'm sure almost nobody even outside HN thinks that self driving cars will be better than themselves. Everybody thinks they're above average drivers. That's a psychological problem that self-driving cars will have to overcome. They need to be so obviously better than any human driver for people to actually consider them. A handful of fatal accidents that people think they could have avoided as a driver and they won't want to get on board. People are bad at risk assessment, but that's a fact of life. As a result, self driving has to be better than what people _perceive_ as their risk of being in an accident while driving, not what the actual risk may be.
- tristor 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't think self-driving cars will /ever/ be a better driver than I am. But that also hinges on what you mean by "better". There may reach a point in time when self-driving cars have a lower statistical likelihood of being in an accident than I am, but I doubt that they will ever do that while getting me to my destination more quickly than I do. Both of those things relate to the fact that I have significantly better situational awareness and driver training than the vast majority of people, including significant time on track racing cars. To match my situational awareness it will not be enough for self-driving cars to rely on their own sensors, but they will need to communicate with one another and act in concert, otherwise my reading of traffic patterns and looking far ahead in the distance will always beat it out for the quickest path through traffic, or the safest response. To me, where I see a benefit for myself personally, is that self-driving cars don't necessarily need to be better than me, they just need to be better than most, and turn driving from an active to a passive activity. It means I can be engaged in other things. But, that's also the rub. I /like/ driving, so I don't want to exist in a world where I am /forced/ to have a self-driving car to use the roads, as I still want the ability to go out and enjoy myself from time to time. But for a daily commute, turning driving into a passive activity would make me a happier and more productive person (other people are horrendous drivers and it frustrates me observing their unsafe and careless behaviors).
Hydraulix989 5y ago
Does the average driver even look both ways at the railroad crossing? I do every single time. Such a low-cost preventative measure that could very well end up saving my life one day.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  At least where I learned to drive, not only was stopping to look both ways at railroad crossings taught in driving classes at school, it was part of the written test to get a permit/license, as well.

f6v 5y ago

Now look at AstraZeneca craze. Vaccines save lives, thrombosis cases are extremely rare. Yet the guy on street is talking to someone on the phone: “Do not take AZ! I repeat: do not take AZ!!!”. Technology has to make just one mistake to lose layman’s confidence.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road. And yet there is no evidence that computers are better drivers than people are. I do have to ask, are we using the same computers? I've been using them for decades, and they're consistently buggy, error prone and straight-up factually wrong a lot of the time.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

simias 5y ago

Even if you're right, that's the same argument for airplane safety. The problem is being in control versus putting your hands in the hands of an unknown third party. The psychological, ethical and legal implications are completely different. If tomorrow I drive a car and run a kid over then I'll be in trouble and you'll probably never hear about it. If tomorrow I get in my Tesla self-driving car and it runs a kid over then you'll hear about it everywhere and Tesla's responsibility will be invoked. Because whose else? The bar for self driving cars is not being as good (or bad) as a human driver, they need to be orders of magnitude safer in all situations. They need to have airplane industry numbers, not Average Joe drunk driving numbers.

joe_the_user 5y ago

A human being can drive a million miles without a serious accident. 2018 saw 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven[1]. Human beings are extremely good at driving safely overall. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

steve_adams_86 5y ago
Yeah, I think people conflate seeing people drive erratically or doing dumb things in cars with an inability to operate a car in a way that ultimately prevents deaths. Humans are incredibly good at that in the bigger picture for reasons that are currently impossible to replicate with a computer. Criticize human driving all you want, but even the worst of us can typically manage to get from point a to point b... Somehow.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  One of the eye-opening things about the wikipedia statistics is that advent and universality of mobile phones at worst caused a very small uptick in fatalities. With all the bullshit you see with on the road, somehow people manage to mostly avoid death doing it. My guess is people can pull attention back to the road at moments it's really needed.
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    For sure. Well, humans don't really need to make great decisions individually to be protected, ultimately, by most people making an effort not to kill or be killed – to some degree at least. It's a very strange and fascinating thing about us. I mean, that industrial agriculture eventually results in food on tables across the globe. So many systems at work. Run by the same people using their smart phones in their cars, haha. We manage to collectively make things happen. Easy to criticize, but hard to argue against the results?
cameronh90 5y ago
Yet driving deaths are the leading cause of death in older children and young adults. It's not that we're bad at driving, I suppose, it's that we do an awful lot of it and it's quite a risky activity - especially if you're not 100% engaged. That being said, if the US cared about road safety, there's quite a lot they could do to improve it already. Many techniques have been used successfully in other countries to significantly reduce road deaths, for example, a nationwide vehicle safety inspection standard and lowering speeds on urban roads. The fact that these aren't being done leads me to think the concerns about road safety are actually rather irrelevant for the country as a whole. When self driving cars exist and are convenient, people probably will switch to them, as long as the accident rate is vaguely comparable.

jandrese 5y ago

Self driving cars would have to kill over 1.35 million people each year to be as bad as human drivers[1]. But there is no reason we should be happy if a self driving technology "only" kills 1.2 million people in a year. That number is absurd and should not be considered acceptable. I think in the semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick, something only to be attempted by professionals or in limited circumstances like pulling into a field to park or some other low speed maneuvering. [1] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

okareaman 5y ago
> semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick totally agree but I'm skeptical of current tech to get there in the near time frame being talked about. It's all in how you define semi-distant
gpm 5y ago
We should be delighted if we have a self driving technology that only kills 1.2 million people a year. 1. That's an incredible amount of saved time, people now get that time back that they use to have to spend driving. We would have eliminated the largest suck of human time on the planet (truck driving). Etc. The main benefit of self driving is not safety. 2. We have a working baseline that we can improve upon to drive that number down, and since computer programs don't have the "new drivers need to learn from scratch" problem, those improvements will stick around approximately forever.
matz1 5y ago
Hell, I would happy if self driving cars only kills 1.5 (slightly more) million people each car.

toast0 5y ago

> Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road. Computers are better than some drivers, but they're worse than others. If the goal is safety, computerized assistance is almost certainly better than self driving. Keeping the human driver engaged and doing their best, but having the computer supervising works a lot better than having the human supervising; it's hard for a human to remain alert enough to intervene quickly enough when needed. I don't know if there are good studies yet, but I expect automatic emergency braking to reduce severity of a lot of collissions. Cross traffic warnings probably eliminates a lot of minor (and some major) collisions. There are systems now to detect wakefulness; if those are combined with something to safely pull over and stop, that could reduce a lot of tragic collisions as well.

totetsu 5y ago
> If the goal is safety If the goal was safety, a computer assisting a competent driver would be the best. If the goal is private profits for a few individuals, then a computer that doesn't take a paycheck would be best.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Unclear. There's some level of computer driving competence where humans will simply zone out.