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Average human is actually quite terrible in driving cars, as evidenced by the global death toll numbering in dosens of thousands every year. Even halving this n

Average human is actually quite terrible in driving cars, as evidenced by the global death toll numbering in dosens of thousands every year. Even halving this number would be a win, losing a lot of people to such edge cases. However, the nature of the problem would not allow for it, because every death from a self-driving car will get excessive coverage and public outrage, and people will prefer losing far more people to human errors than fewer to computer errors.

rurp 5y ago
All the more reason for Tesla to avoid sleazy sales tactics like calling adaptive cruise control "self driving", and claiming that cars will be able to drive themselves coast to coast before 2020. People _might_ overreact to deaths from true self driving cars, but we don't know that yet because such vehicles don't exist.
drfuchs 5y ago
The annual US death toll alone is dozens of thousands; the global number is well over a million.
albertgoeswoof 5y ago
I don’t think that’s the case- I don’t think there’s any evidence that self driving cars are better drivers than human drivers in real world conditions. If this were only a human psychology problem, someone would just dump a fleet of self driving cars on the road and prove they have the tech. The rewards are too good to ignore and surpass any potential fine/regulation, if the tech is good enough. But it’s not there yet, it might never get there. We’re so far off general AI it’s unreal, e.g. a human can drive a car with a single eye open, and one hand on the wheel, and another on a throttle- all from the drivers seat. Even with sensors and data coming in from all over the car, AI can’t manage it.
- ksdale 5y ago
  I didn't take the parent to be saying that self-driving is better, just that humans are really surprisingly bad, and that's the bar we should be measuring against, not an ideal world where no one dies in traffic accidents.
  - throwaway946513 5y ago
    The main ethical issue of 'deaths due to self-driving cars' is because of who being at fault? If the car is self-driving, and truly self driving - no steering wheel, when it causes an accident, who is at fault? Humans make mistakes, but humans also can change their response easily to a given input. Is Tesla at fault? Do we just issue them a fine for a person's life? Should the car do its best to preserve the life inside the vehicle, or the lives outside the vehicle? Automobiles do significant damage to pedestrians in regards to their dangerous design. Surely corporations should be held to a higher standard than people, as they're not bound by the same restrictions a single person is.
    - ksdale 5y ago
      I don't see how that's any different of an issue for when any machine malfunctions and kills someone. Was the design or manufacture of the machine negligent in some way? Was it a failure mode that we've decided is rare enough that no one is at fault? Self-driving cars may be new, but deaths caused by machines are as old as machines.
      - throwaway946513 5y ago
        Machines in a business setting when they cause death, often it is due to improper safety protocol for said machines. Consumer devices don't have this level of control over a person's life anywhere near as often, in the sense that the device has your life at stake and makes decisions for you. "no one is at fault" is entirely counter intuitive to engineering principles. When a rare accident happens, the engineer is often responsible. We don't 'build' AI in anywhere remotely the same way as buildings or legacy software products, there isn't a 'designer' for said AI system other than the training model - which can certainly not account for every possible edge case. Self-driving cars can't 'only be \better\ than humans'. Because only humans can currently drive. Self-driving cars need to be nearly 100% safe when you entirely remove the human driver.
        ksdale 5y ago
czzr 5y ago
Come back and make this comment when we actually have something better than human driving.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Human walking, human biking.
ksdale 5y ago
This is a very underappreciated point. SO many people die from driving each year, but a lot of people treat a single death from self-driving cars as a reason to scrap the whole endeavor.
Nimitz14 5y ago
Humans are quite good at driving cars, as evidenced by the death toll per million km. In fair comparisons self-driving cars aren't even close. Yes people would prefer to have agency in their lives and die based on their own decisions instead of a nameless programmer (a large fraction of the victims have themselves to blame for their death, this would change with self-driving cars).
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  > In fair comparisons self-driving cars aren't even close. Please reference a fair comparison. AFAICT, we only have the unfair comparisons from Tesla, which say that Autopilot has an accident rate 1/5th compared to when it's disabled, and that Full Self Driving Beta has 0 accidents total. Neither of those comparisons are fair, but that's the best we have, AFAICT.
stouset 5y ago
Put into scale, there were 1.11 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven in the United States in 2019. The average human is actually surprisingly good at driving cars, we just drive 3.9 trillion miles per year so the absolute numbers of fatalities are enormous. I say this as a person who genuinely feels like people are generally terrible at driving. Should we improve these numbers? Of course. But AI-driven cars will have to beat a pretty high floor of capability here. It's entirely possible they're already there but it's difficult to know for sure given the biased way the numbers are calculated. The manufacturers claim that their systems are much safer drivers than humans, but those systems also hand control back to the human driver during difficult or unpredictable situations. It's easy for the statistics to swing in AI's favor when they only have to count the "easy" majority of miles while shifting blame back to humans for the hard parts.
lhorie 5y ago
Isn't that a bit of a false dichotomy? GP is specifically calling out that self driving technology has limitations (and specifically as they pertain to car accidents being edge cases in the first place). Self driving tech hasn't proven itself to be better than human drivers outside of controlled environments, nor are these two options the only options available (e.g. more investment in public transit and alternate forms of transport come to mind as being very closely related to the problem space) By all means, improve the tech and show us that it can in fact put out better-than-status-quo safety numbers, but it's important to not confuse potential with wishful thinking.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Humans are actually really good at driving - we had just assumed it was easy because anyone could do it. Driving plays to our two key strengths - tool use, and cooperation. Indeed, the car becomes an extension of our body, and the road is our forum.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Don't forget all the sensory processing stuff that comes with being a predator that eats other mobile animals.
dml2135 5y ago
The main barrier is the state of the tech, not media outrage. There is a gap between the current state of the tech, and computers being better at driving than humans, that may be impossible to bridge. In order to bridge it, as a society we would need to accept a period where these things start to become more common, but they make our roads less safe. Only through trial-and-error in blood can this technology improve. I don't think we will collectively see it as a worthwhile experiment.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Must there be blood? How many people have died because of Waymo driving? How many because of Tesla or Uber?

rurp 5y ago

All the more reason for Tesla to avoid sleazy sales tactics like calling adaptive cruise control "self driving", and claiming that cars will be able to drive themselves coast to coast before 2020. People _might_ overreact to deaths from true self driving cars, but we don't know that yet because such vehicles don't exist.

drfuchs 5y ago

The annual US death toll alone is dozens of thousands; the global number is well over a million.

albertgoeswoof 5y ago

I don’t think that’s the case- I don’t think there’s any evidence that self driving cars are better drivers than human drivers in real world conditions. If this were only a human psychology problem, someone would just dump a fleet of self driving cars on the road and prove they have the tech. The rewards are too good to ignore and surpass any potential fine/regulation, if the tech is good enough. But it’s not there yet, it might never get there. We’re so far off general AI it’s unreal, e.g. a human can drive a car with a single eye open, and one hand on the wheel, and another on a throttle- all from the drivers seat. Even with sensors and data coming in from all over the car, AI can’t manage it.

ksdale 5y ago
I didn't take the parent to be saying that self-driving is better, just that humans are really surprisingly bad, and that's the bar we should be measuring against, not an ideal world where no one dies in traffic accidents.
- throwaway946513 5y ago
  The main ethical issue of 'deaths due to self-driving cars' is because of who being at fault? If the car is self-driving, and truly self driving - no steering wheel, when it causes an accident, who is at fault? Humans make mistakes, but humans also can change their response easily to a given input. Is Tesla at fault? Do we just issue them a fine for a person's life? Should the car do its best to preserve the life inside the vehicle, or the lives outside the vehicle? Automobiles do significant damage to pedestrians in regards to their dangerous design. Surely corporations should be held to a higher standard than people, as they're not bound by the same restrictions a single person is.
  - ksdale 5y ago
    I don't see how that's any different of an issue for when any machine malfunctions and kills someone. Was the design or manufacture of the machine negligent in some way? Was it a failure mode that we've decided is rare enough that no one is at fault? Self-driving cars may be new, but deaths caused by machines are as old as machines.
    - throwaway946513 5y ago
      Machines in a business setting when they cause death, often it is due to improper safety protocol for said machines. Consumer devices don't have this level of control over a person's life anywhere near as often, in the sense that the device has your life at stake and makes decisions for you. "no one is at fault" is entirely counter intuitive to engineering principles. When a rare accident happens, the engineer is often responsible. We don't 'build' AI in anywhere remotely the same way as buildings or legacy software products, there isn't a 'designer' for said AI system other than the training model - which can certainly not account for every possible edge case. Self-driving cars can't 'only be \better\ than humans'. Because only humans can currently drive. Self-driving cars need to be nearly 100% safe when you entirely remove the human driver.
      - ksdale 5y ago

czzr 5y ago

Come back and make this comment when we actually have something better than human driving.

datavirtue 5y ago
Human walking, human biking.

ksdale 5y ago

This is a very underappreciated point. SO many people die from driving each year, but a lot of people treat a single death from self-driving cars as a reason to scrap the whole endeavor.

Nimitz14 5y ago

Humans are quite good at driving cars, as evidenced by the death toll per million km. In fair comparisons self-driving cars aren't even close. Yes people would prefer to have agency in their lives and die based on their own decisions instead of a nameless programmer (a large fraction of the victims have themselves to blame for their death, this would change with self-driving cars).

bryanlarsen 5y ago
> In fair comparisons self-driving cars aren't even close. Please reference a fair comparison. AFAICT, we only have the unfair comparisons from Tesla, which say that Autopilot has an accident rate 1/5th compared to when it's disabled, and that Full Self Driving Beta has 0 accidents total. Neither of those comparisons are fair, but that's the best we have, AFAICT.

stouset 5y ago

Put into scale, there were 1.11 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven in the United States in 2019. The average human is actually surprisingly good at driving cars, we just drive 3.9 trillion miles per year so the absolute numbers of fatalities are enormous. I say this as a person who genuinely feels like people are generally terrible at driving. Should we improve these numbers? Of course. But AI-driven cars will have to beat a pretty high floor of capability here. It's entirely possible they're already there but it's difficult to know for sure given the biased way the numbers are calculated. The manufacturers claim that their systems are much safer drivers than humans, but those systems also hand control back to the human driver during difficult or unpredictable situations. It's easy for the statistics to swing in AI's favor when they only have to count the "easy" majority of miles while shifting blame back to humans for the hard parts.

lhorie 5y ago

Isn't that a bit of a false dichotomy? GP is specifically calling out that self driving technology has limitations (and specifically as they pertain to car accidents being edge cases in the first place). Self driving tech hasn't proven itself to be better than human drivers outside of controlled environments, nor are these two options the only options available (e.g. more investment in public transit and alternate forms of transport come to mind as being very closely related to the problem space) By all means, improve the tech and show us that it can in fact put out better-than-status-quo safety numbers, but it's important to not confuse potential with wishful thinking.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

Humans are actually really good at driving - we had just assumed it was easy because anyone could do it. Driving plays to our two key strengths - tool use, and cooperation. Indeed, the car becomes an extension of our body, and the road is our forum.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Don't forget all the sensory processing stuff that comes with being a predator that eats other mobile animals.

dml2135 5y ago

The main barrier is the state of the tech, not media outrage. There is a gap between the current state of the tech, and computers being better at driving than humans, that may be impossible to bridge. In order to bridge it, as a society we would need to accept a period where these things start to become more common, but they make our roads less safe. Only through trial-and-error in blood can this technology improve. I don't think we will collectively see it as a worthwhile experiment.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Must there be blood? How many people have died because of Waymo driving? How many because of Tesla or Uber?