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If industry leads regulation on this, I predict a Challenger-like disaster that sets the self-driving industry back by decades. A fatal school bus collision or
by jordanpg 5y ago
If industry leads regulation on this, I predict a Challenger-like disaster that sets the self-driving industry back by decades. A fatal school bus collision or something like that.
I hope the companies making these things are calculating margins for safety, tripling them, adding triple failsafes for everything, and not compromising on any safety standard, ever.
But we all know they aren't. There's far too much money at stake.
If there ever was a case for the government to proactively apply standards, this is it. Yes, there would be a delay, but it would be worth it, measured against the psychological and legal damage that will occur when (not if) the unthinkable occurs. Given probability p, and sufficiently large N and t, it is inevitable.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoThere's already been an industry-shaking accident that led to vast reforms in regulation and program design: the Elaine Herzberg crash. I can't speak to every company in the space (and I can think of a couple that don't seem to have much in the way of safety), but all of organizations I've worked for are very diligent about safety and looking to improve. N > 1 here, so they exist.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat crash did not have the kind of effect on the perpetrators that it should have had.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoNeither did the challenger disaster. Both are continuously (and somewhat tediously) referenced in the introduction to every safety-related discussion, alongside therac-25 for software talks and the martian orbiter for units library talks.
- sebzim4500 5y agoI don't think a single fatal school bus collision will do much. After all, there are fatal collisions with human drivers all the time and yet there is very little public support for banning human drivers.
- rootusrootus 5y agoWe can't live without human drivers, though. We can absolutely live without automated cars. And when it becomes clear that corporate greed drove some cost-cutting choice which made the automated car less safe by design, it will be the kiss of death for the technology.