7 ms·

There's also the very common argument (even here on HN) that it doesn't matter because "humans have plenty of accidents too". I think it's not a good rebuttal

by simias 5y ago

There's also the very common argument (even here on HN) that it doesn't matter because "humans have plenty of accidents too". I think it's not a good rebuttal because self-driving cars will have to be orders of magnitude safer than humans if order to be successful. If I'm drunk and I decide to drive and I end up crashing into a pedestrian, then it's my own damn fault and I'll face the consequences. If a self-driving car bugs out and kills someone, who's responsible? All it'll take in a few dozen stories of self-driving cars diving into oncoming traffic like in the parent's story and that'll destroy any trust in the tech for the foreseeable future.

ffggvv 5y ago
theres actually no proof of the claim that its safer or even as safe as human driving. The only "data" is from tesla themselves. Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.
- arcticfox 5y ago
  > Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death. This is false: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before a crash." https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport It would be more helpful to focus on actually deceptive issues in how they report data, namely the conflation of easy highway miles (Autopilot enabled) with more dangerous city driving (Autopilot unavailable). For example their Q1 2021 report: "In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles."
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    5 seconds is not nearly enough time. If you need to drive 3 seconds behind a vehicle going the same speed as you to have safe reaction time & stopping distance, then you certainly can't (a) move your attention back to the road you weren't looking at because "autopilot" "self-driving" and (b) react to a stationary object and (c) come to a stop, all in 5.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    *except in cases where the black box is totally destroyed due to 4 hour battery fires. yeah maybe i was exaggerating but autopilot can definitely get you in positions where its impossible to get out of and the deactivate 5 secs before actual collision. And autopilot is only engaged on highways but they are comparing its safety to accidents per mile in general. But those stats are strongly skewed by city and non-highway driving, where autopilot doesnt work at all.
  - ska 5y ago
    You are correct about the 100ms (although 5s is too short, should be something like 30 given our understanding of task switching) but it's worth pointing out that the comparison you quote (and all those like it, not just from Tesla) is disingenuous. All the self driving companies do this, but it only makes sense to compare # of accidents/mile between like processes. It's an ok proxy for total risk iff accidents were uniformly distributed, but we know that isn't even close to true. With a system like Teslas', it is preferentially, probably approximately exclusively if normalized by distance, deployed in situations with a lower accident rate - comparing that to total rates is nonsense. What would be more interesting is Tesla vs. human accident rates on only freeway miles, say, but I haven't seen that anywhere, have you? Best rough stats I can find is that less than 1/2 of all accidents happen on highways. There are a also a ton of fender-bender, parking lot and/or traffic jam accidents that aren't really applicable either.
    - 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
It doesn't make any sense to look at a situation and say "well, I could save 5 lives at no cost ... but nah". It really doesn't matter who is responsible when a self driving car kills someone. We're going to respond by making the self-driving module of the car safer whether it is responsible or not. We're putting a driver on the road who can still learn after suffering a fatal accident! This is huge, it means all parts of the system can learn from anything and will practically eliminate deaths in the long term; much like in the airline industry. If the short term is safer but confusing we should do that and who cares about philosophical technicalities. This attitude could literally get people killed for no measurable gain. Saving lives and reducing road deaths (which comes with a whole host of other benefits, like freeing up an enormous number of hours of people's time) is much more important than worrying about holding people responsible. We shouldn't be trying to hold people responsible for tragedies, we should be trying to prevent tragedies! And we need to keep getting self driving cars into common use to push them up the technological learning curve . This is much more important than worrying about who is at fault because it will make the cars an order of magnitude safer. The payoffs here are so huge it is even worth putting them on the road if they are slightly less safe than humans then subsidising the producer's legal costs to hold their risk down.
- bumby 5y ago
  >who cares about philosophical technicalities The whole argument above is built upon the assumption that everybody agrees with a utilitarian mindset so I’m assuming the answer to the question, in part, is you should care about the philosophical underpinnings.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Which philosophy are people subscribing to where they are happy to accept a mound of corpses in exchange for holding someone accountable? Not preventing them from doing something in the future, mind you. Holding them accountable won't be a net long term improvement. Just accountability for the sake of punishment. I'm sure there are people who believe that, but I suspect most of the reputable philosophers will agree with the utilitarians on this particular issue. It is difficult to defend against "your stubbornness will cause mounds of corpses for no obvious gain". This is a pretty clear cut line of approach.
xiphias2 5y ago
For me 10% safer is enough when I pick between Uber or self driving. The truth is though that we're stull far from that treshold.

by simias 5y ago

ffggvv 5y ago

theres actually no proof of the claim that its safer or even as safe as human driving. The only "data" is from tesla themselves. Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.

arcticfox 5y ago
> Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death. This is false: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before a crash." https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport It would be more helpful to focus on actually deceptive issues in how they report data, namely the conflation of easy highway miles (Autopilot enabled) with more dangerous city driving (Autopilot unavailable). For example their Q1 2021 report: "In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles."
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  5 seconds is not nearly enough time. If you need to drive 3 seconds behind a vehicle going the same speed as you to have safe reaction time & stopping distance, then you certainly can't (a) move your attention back to the road you weren't looking at because "autopilot" "self-driving" and (b) react to a stationary object and (c) come to a stop, all in 5.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ffggvv 5y ago
  *except in cases where the black box is totally destroyed due to 4 hour battery fires. yeah maybe i was exaggerating but autopilot can definitely get you in positions where its impossible to get out of and the deactivate 5 secs before actual collision. And autopilot is only engaged on highways but they are comparing its safety to accidents per mile in general. But those stats are strongly skewed by city and non-highway driving, where autopilot doesnt work at all.
- ska 5y ago
  You are correct about the 100ms (although 5s is too short, should be something like 30 given our understanding of task switching) but it's worth pointing out that the comparison you quote (and all those like it, not just from Tesla) is disingenuous. All the self driving companies do this, but it only makes sense to compare # of accidents/mile between like processes. It's an ok proxy for total risk iff accidents were uniformly distributed, but we know that isn't even close to true. With a system like Teslas', it is preferentially, probably approximately exclusively if normalized by distance, deployed in situations with a lower accident rate - comparing that to total rates is nonsense. What would be more interesting is Tesla vs. human accident rates on only freeway miles, say, but I haven't seen that anywhere, have you? Best rough stats I can find is that less than 1/2 of all accidents happen on highways. There are a also a ton of fender-bender, parking lot and/or traffic jam accidents that aren't really applicable either.
  - 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

It doesn't make any sense to look at a situation and say "well, I could save 5 lives at no cost ... but nah". It really doesn't matter who is responsible when a self driving car kills someone. We're going to respond by making the self-driving module of the car safer whether it is responsible or not. We're putting a driver on the road who can still learn after suffering a fatal accident! This is huge, it means all parts of the system can learn from anything and will practically eliminate deaths in the long term; much like in the airline industry. If the short term is safer but confusing we should do that and who cares about philosophical technicalities. This attitude could literally get people killed for no measurable gain. Saving lives and reducing road deaths (which comes with a whole host of other benefits, like freeing up an enormous number of hours of people's time) is much more important than worrying about holding people responsible. We shouldn't be trying to hold people responsible for tragedies, we should be trying to prevent tragedies! And we need to keep getting self driving cars into common use to push them up the technological learning curve . This is much more important than worrying about who is at fault because it will make the cars an order of magnitude safer. The payoffs here are so huge it is even worth putting them on the road if they are slightly less safe than humans then subsidising the producer's legal costs to hold their risk down.

bumby 5y ago
>who cares about philosophical technicalities The whole argument above is built upon the assumption that everybody agrees with a utilitarian mindset so I’m assuming the answer to the question, in part, is you should care about the philosophical underpinnings.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Which philosophy are people subscribing to where they are happy to accept a mound of corpses in exchange for holding someone accountable? Not preventing them from doing something in the future, mind you. Holding them accountable won't be a net long term improvement. Just accountability for the sake of punishment. I'm sure there are people who believe that, but I suspect most of the reputable philosophers will agree with the utilitarians on this particular issue. It is difficult to defend against "your stubbornness will cause mounds of corpses for no obvious gain". This is a pretty clear cut line of approach.

xiphias2 5y ago

For me 10% safer is enough when I pick between Uber or self driving. The truth is though that we're stull far from that treshold.