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> We will rightly hold the algorithm to a much higher quality bar than existing human drivers. Rightly? Delaying a life-saving measure when it's the #9 cause o

> We will rightly hold the algorithm to a much higher quality bar than existing human drivers. Rightly? Delaying a life-saving measure when it's the #9 cause of death? They should be deployed selectively as soon as they can make the most risk-prone situations safer than the cohort of involved human drivers. E.g. getting drunk people home. We don't have to wait until they surpass the average driver because the average driver is not necessarily the driver (heh) of deaths. Doing anything else is leaving bodies on the table.

bee_rider 5y ago
I can definitely see your argument, but there are some downsides to deploying ASAP: * Long term, the reputational damage to self driving cars might be significant if one is released that is only slightly better than a drunk driver. If this hinders uptake later, when self-driving cars are completely superior to normal humans, we've possibly produced a net negative. * While a self driving car should be safer than a drunk driver, the best option would be to call a cab or have a designated driver. It seems morally fraught to provide a solution that is more dangerous than existing ones, even if the less dangerous solutions have less than 100% uptake. * Related, there may be some people who will instead of viewing a self-driving car as some sort of emergency option to avoid putting another drunk driver on the road, see it as a more convenient option to inviting a designated driver. * Issues around who is responsible when a self driving car which is known to be worse than a typical human is deployed, fails, and someone is hurt.
- the8472 5y ago
  This is mostly worrying about hard to predict second-order effects. Exactly the same problem that caused various health organizations (including WHO and FDA) send misleading messages around corona and vaccinations. > Issues around who is responsible when a self driving car which is known to be worse than a typical human is deployed, fails, and someone is hurt. Even if insurance rates would be initially(!) higher than for a regular taxi driver I would expect it to end up cheaper overall and save lives. Also note that "worse-than-the-old-average" may still end up improving the average because the magnitude by which they're worse is lower. Also, there's nothing magical about "worse-than-average" because for all distributions (except the dirac distribution) there is always some fraction worse than the average, so we always have to expect some fraction of drivers to be worse than average and there's no fundamental reason why they must be human. In fact, if the fleet of all cars in the world consisted of very safe, very consistently behaving autonomous cars, except for a single vehicle driven by a very conservative human driver who only slowly circles in a fenced private community and never hits anyone then statistically the entire autonomous car fleet may be "worse than average" due to the single outlier.
  - deleted 5y ago
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bee_rider 5y ago

I can definitely see your argument, but there are some downsides to deploying ASAP: * Long term, the reputational damage to self driving cars might be significant if one is released that is only slightly better than a drunk driver. If this hinders uptake later, when self-driving cars are completely superior to normal humans, we've possibly produced a net negative. * While a self driving car should be safer than a drunk driver, the best option would be to call a cab or have a designated driver. It seems morally fraught to provide a solution that is more dangerous than existing ones, even if the less dangerous solutions have less than 100% uptake. * Related, there may be some people who will instead of viewing a self-driving car as some sort of emergency option to avoid putting another drunk driver on the road, see it as a more convenient option to inviting a designated driver. * Issues around who is responsible when a self driving car which is known to be worse than a typical human is deployed, fails, and someone is hurt.

the8472 5y ago
This is mostly worrying about hard to predict second-order effects. Exactly the same problem that caused various health organizations (including WHO and FDA) send misleading messages around corona and vaccinations. > Issues around who is responsible when a self driving car which is known to be worse than a typical human is deployed, fails, and someone is hurt. Even if insurance rates would be initially(!) higher than for a regular taxi driver I would expect it to end up cheaper overall and save lives. Also note that "worse-than-the-old-average" may still end up improving the average because the magnitude by which they're worse is lower. Also, there's nothing magical about "worse-than-average" because for all distributions (except the dirac distribution) there is always some fraction worse than the average, so we always have to expect some fraction of drivers to be worse than average and there's no fundamental reason why they must be human. In fact, if the fleet of all cars in the world consisted of very safe, very consistently behaving autonomous cars, except for a single vehicle driven by a very conservative human driver who only slowly circles in a fenced private community and never hits anyone then statistically the entire autonomous car fleet may be "worse than average" due to the single outlier.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]