3 ms·

Somewhere there should be stats on taxi and bus driver accidents. I think that is what self-driving should be compared to, not the average person. It's "apply

Somewhere there should be stats on taxi and bus driver accidents. I think that is what self-driving should be compared to, not the average person. It's "applying for a job" as a professional driver, not as a simulated drunk, texting, shaving, eating, feet-on-dashboard average American driver. Not too high a bar.

Retric 5y ago
I agree it’s a good idea to have higher standards for self driving Taxis. However, delaying self driving cars that would be safer than the average driver would cost lives. Mostly I just want drunk drivers taken off the road ASAP.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Suppose we have a lot of self-driving vehicles that are slightly better than drunks, and the worst drunks use them. Maybe they can be hooked up to breathalyzers or something. How can we ensure that the increase in the amount of driving (riding) that drunks do, doesn't more than cancel out the reduction in the rate of accidents? What if, the self-driving being available to non-drunks, they use it because it's fun and futuristic, and that increases the amount of accidents even more?
  - Retric 5y ago
    > slightly better than drunks We are well past that point. At even just 0.08 BAC a driver is 7 times as likely to cause a fatal accident and it gets dramatically worse as BAC increases. Self driving are close to the norm right now, even if they where say 20% more dangerous than an average alert driver it would take a massive increase in miles driven by drunk people for things to end up worse. Anyway, the penalties are currently the same with and without self driving, hell sleeping in your car while drunk is illegal. As long as the laws stay the same things should stay about the same while saving 10’s of thousands of lives.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      A drunk driver might be 7 times, or 70 times, or 700 times as likely to have an accident. That range is plausible to me. But estimates of the proportion of trips under the influence of alcohol that I was able to find were around 0.03%. (111 million out of 411 billion) So I don't see a logical reason to rule out their driving increasing by ten times, or 100 times, or more. And I don't see what the justification would be for assuming a self-driving system is within 20% of an arbitrary standard. Because drunk drivers are so bad, as you point out, there's a lot of space between "as bad as a drunk" and "as good as an average non drunk". I think it's completely plausible that a system could be ten times or a hundred times worse than an average human and it not be obvious. That's because an average human has one fatal accident in approximately 100 lifetimes (in the US). Or, for another reference point, drivers had fatalities about 7 times more often per mile, in 1950 than now. Without saying I know exactly what numbers to use, I'm pretty certain that betting on things matching to within 20% is unjustified without, well, a specific logical justification. However, regarding penalties being the same, this seems like a lack of incentives that would mean neither lives saved nor lost. Also, I don't think saving tens of thousands of lives per year is a possibility if we're talking about alcohol in the US. I believe there are only on the order of 10,000 fatalities per year. I note that millions of people (again, in the US) seem to think 10,000 covid-19 fatalities in only a few weeks is not worth even wearing a mask to stop. Some of the things I read while writing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
      - Retric 5y ago
        > around 0.03% People don’t drink that much to really push the numbers all that high. 100x as much would mean people spent 3% of there time drunk while making trips. That would take drastic changes in behavior as most people generally either don’t drink or drink at home. Considering the average drunk has a much higher than .08 BAC I just don’t see this as a significant possibility. Also, 20% was used as twice as bad as the pessimistic article about Tesla’s Autopilot posted in this comment thread. The thing is if self driving systems where drastically worse we would have significant real world evidence of it. Basically the better the system the more data you need to collect. If they killed someone every 1,000,000 miles well there would be piles of bodies from these systems. Arguably only Tesla’s system has gotten anywhere near enough data to start doing some comparison and the error bars are still quite high. I have no problem saying near human performance on average but specific numbers depend on various assumptions. Some estimates say better, others worse that’s close enough to say it’s much better than a drunk driving. Take Google’s completely autonomous system, it’s only at 20 million miles. So sure it’s got zero fatalities but a group of humans could easily clock 10 times that without any families.

Retric 5y ago

I agree it’s a good idea to have higher standards for self driving Taxis. However, delaying self driving cars that would be safer than the average driver would cost lives. Mostly I just want drunk drivers taken off the road ASAP.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
perl4ever 5y ago
Suppose we have a lot of self-driving vehicles that are slightly better than drunks, and the worst drunks use them. Maybe they can be hooked up to breathalyzers or something. How can we ensure that the increase in the amount of driving (riding) that drunks do, doesn't more than cancel out the reduction in the rate of accidents? What if, the self-driving being available to non-drunks, they use it because it's fun and futuristic, and that increases the amount of accidents even more?
- Retric 5y ago
  > slightly better than drunks We are well past that point. At even just 0.08 BAC a driver is 7 times as likely to cause a fatal accident and it gets dramatically worse as BAC increases. Self driving are close to the norm right now, even if they where say 20% more dangerous than an average alert driver it would take a massive increase in miles driven by drunk people for things to end up worse. Anyway, the penalties are currently the same with and without self driving, hell sleeping in your car while drunk is illegal. As long as the laws stay the same things should stay about the same while saving 10’s of thousands of lives.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    A drunk driver might be 7 times, or 70 times, or 700 times as likely to have an accident. That range is plausible to me. But estimates of the proportion of trips under the influence of alcohol that I was able to find were around 0.03%. (111 million out of 411 billion) So I don't see a logical reason to rule out their driving increasing by ten times, or 100 times, or more. And I don't see what the justification would be for assuming a self-driving system is within 20% of an arbitrary standard. Because drunk drivers are so bad, as you point out, there's a lot of space between "as bad as a drunk" and "as good as an average non drunk". I think it's completely plausible that a system could be ten times or a hundred times worse than an average human and it not be obvious. That's because an average human has one fatal accident in approximately 100 lifetimes (in the US). Or, for another reference point, drivers had fatalities about 7 times more often per mile, in 1950 than now. Without saying I know exactly what numbers to use, I'm pretty certain that betting on things matching to within 20% is unjustified without, well, a specific logical justification. However, regarding penalties being the same, this seems like a lack of incentives that would mean neither lives saved nor lost. Also, I don't think saving tens of thousands of lives per year is a possibility if we're talking about alcohol in the US. I believe there are only on the order of 10,000 fatalities per year. I note that millions of people (again, in the US) seem to think 10,000 covid-19 fatalities in only a few weeks is not worth even wearing a mask to stop. Some of the things I read while writing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
    - Retric 5y ago
      > around 0.03% People don’t drink that much to really push the numbers all that high. 100x as much would mean people spent 3% of there time drunk while making trips. That would take drastic changes in behavior as most people generally either don’t drink or drink at home. Considering the average drunk has a much higher than .08 BAC I just don’t see this as a significant possibility. Also, 20% was used as twice as bad as the pessimistic article about Tesla’s Autopilot posted in this comment thread. The thing is if self driving systems where drastically worse we would have significant real world evidence of it. Basically the better the system the more data you need to collect. If they killed someone every 1,000,000 miles well there would be piles of bodies from these systems. Arguably only Tesla’s system has gotten anywhere near enough data to start doing some comparison and the error bars are still quite high. I have no problem saying near human performance on average but specific numbers depend on various assumptions. Some estimates say better, others worse that’s close enough to say it’s much better than a drunk driving. Take Google’s completely autonomous system, it’s only at 20 million miles. So sure it’s got zero fatalities but a group of humans could easily clock 10 times that without any families.