9 ms·

We are all unwilling testers of every new teenage driver who hits the road.

Kye 5y ago
A teenager is worried about: getting killed, killing someone else, hurting someone, wrecking their parents' car, losing their permit. I don't trust engineers working on the models that drive these cars to teach a computer the difference between a human and an open road. A teenager can discern these with no effort. I trust a teenager to care about not hitting me and try their best, and to choose a ditch over hitting someone when the decision time comes.
- dgfitz 5y ago
  *A teenager is worried about only about themselves and their immediate happiness
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    I think you'd be immediately unhappy if you crashed your parents car
    - tremon 5y ago
      In the typical teenager's mind, that would be after, not if
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        We are discussing a hypothetical teenager who doesn't exist, who knows? Besides, I had thousands of HN karma (the most important metric of maturity of course) when I was a teenager not very long ago.
      - pempem 5y ago
        Was it an "if" in yours when you were a teenager? There are lots of strong statistical differences that are visible in the teenage population and trickle their way into insurance tables. Basically we could do a better job engendering concern from teenagers, its not some kind of inherent mental lack of capability.
        tremon 5y ago
        My point was that worrying about hypothetical outcomes is not usually at the forefront of a teenager's mind. Sure, they will regret wrecking their parents' car, but that doesn't mean that they will avoid actions that might wreck said car.
        pempem 5y ago
        Yup, got that. Female teenagers are way less likely to have wrecks (1) and if we assume its not driven by one's genitalia and rather by their conditioning - an assumption I hold, its something that can be taught. "In 2019, the motor vehicle death rate for male drivers aged 16–19 was over two times higher than the death rate for female drivers of the same age." 1. https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendrivers_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendr...
- bo1024 5y ago
  To add to your point: it doesn’t bother me so much that the AI system doesn’t share these priorities. What I worry about is that the companies designing them are not incentivized to.
  - ricochet11 5y ago
    surely a company is absolutely incentivized to share these priorities? every accident is a hit to their profits and pr.
    - pempem 5y ago
      I think Tesla has shown this fairly clearly to be untrue. It takes a hit if there isnt' a very solid marketing/pr/charismatic leader to distract
    - bo1024 5y ago
      No, because they can benefit even more from recklessness than the expected profit/PR damage. Someone already mentioned Tesla, but there is also the Volvo emissions scandal, Boeing's safety failures, and many more examples. At the extreme end, picture a company that manages to get an okay from the city of SF for public testing, but whose internal tests show there is a small but significant risk of serious accidents and the product needs another two years of development to be safe. Their funding runs out in one year. What do you think they would do?
- culopatin 5y ago
  They might be worried but suck at risk evaluation so bad that the worry doesn’t really help.
wyldfire 5y ago
Aside: I'm happy to see that teenage drivers today have a lot more required training than I did when I got my license. At least in this US state, and likely most of them. I'm also really happy about the continued advances in auto safety technology.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  US driving test standards are still a joke compared to overseas.
  - yc-kraln 5y ago
    There is no such thing as "US" driving test standards. Each state has its own requirements. Some are quite weak, and some are very vigorous: For instance, Maryland driving licenses are accepted 1:1 as equivalent to the German driving license, you can exchange them without an exam or test. NY and CA... do not simply transfer.
    - QuarterReptile 5y ago
      The interesting thing is that Maryland drivers are among the worst I've seen over a wider spectrum of factors. Sober California drivers seem pretty safe. Virginia drivers are miserable on interstates because they pass one another at 1-3mph differentials (I assume this is a response to the reputed harsh soeeding enforcement there) and are victims of often-wrong signage, but are otherwise uninteresting. South Carolina drivers cause dangerous situations by trying to give away their right of way. Maryland drivers aggressively fight back agaibst merges, change lanes erratically, and crash in a quarter inch of snow at shocking rates, despite the fact that their salt trucks have higher mass-flow-rates than their snow storms. The only drivers who stand out vs Maryland are in big military areas where there's a significant minority of people driving 20mph faster than traffic and merging erratically while doing so.
      - quartz 5y ago
        I think it's more a Baltimore / DC area issue than a Maryland one. Baltimore consistently ranks dead last in best driver reports with DC right behind: https://www.allstate.com/americas-best-drivers/index.htm https://www.allstate.com/americas-best-drivers/index.htm The commuting structure of those cities is just awful and begging for road rage.
ISL 5y ago
And every drunk/elderly driver -- the car's decision to move after a traffic-stop felt very much the behavior of someone with impaired cognition.
- fho 5y ago
  Anecdote: There was an old lady living nearby who despite being 80+ years still driving around in her 20 year old car. She literally ran over traffic cones and ... a child on a tricycle [1] and never got prosecuted. She recently passed away ... sad, but the streets around here are definitely safer now. (This was in Germany just for reference) [1] The child was fine it was a low speed collision ... but still ...
  - yardie 5y ago
    There was recently an accident in Miami Beach. Elderly woman driving a Bentley reversed into a terrace restaurant. Killing 1 and injury 6, including a 3yo [0]. No charges filed because being senile driver (and voter) is not against the law. [0] https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/02/25/recalling-tragic-scene-day-after-woman-backs-into-south-beach-dining-area-kills-1/ https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/02/25/recalling-trag...
    - jen20 5y ago
      In the UK there’s a catch all for this called “driving without due care and attention”.
  - argiopetech 5y ago
    I caution against age as a sole proxy for driving ability. As a contradictory datum, my 80+ year old grandmother (in the USA) maintains a 100+ acre farm. She daily drives a (impeccably maintained) 2006 3/4 ton pickup, to include multiple yearly 10+ hour trips hauling a 10k+ lbs trailer. She almost always brings a passenger on these trips for companionship and safety. I've never heard any complaints, and never personally observed her driving unsafely. It won't be this way forever, and I'm under no illusion that she is the norm for her age, but I'd hazard she's a better drive R than most people on the road. I would like to see a move toward more frequent driver testing for all drivers in the USA, decreasing in frequency after the first few years of driving and increasing in frequency for older drivers. Testing after initial licensing is not the norm in any state I've inhabited, so this would probably require a significant uphill battle on both the individual and government fronts.
boudin 5y ago
A teenage driver can lose its licence. What happens with an AI in this case? Can Cruise lose its licence ?
- striking 5y ago
  Yes.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Who gets a license, though? Cruise, the company? The currently deployed algorithm? Each car w/ the software?
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  > Can Cruise lose its licence ? Of course
eps 5y ago
Depends on the country, but here teenagers are drilled so much during their L phase and on the cars with a manual transmission, so they are probably the safest drivers on the road.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Not true at all in the US. (And no, kids don't learn the manual because no one uses manuals in the US) https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/aaa_fig1.png https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/aaa_fig... Teens are roughly 3x worse than a 20 year old, and 10x worse than a 50 year old.
- yawnr 5y ago
  Yeah definitely not the case in the US. The New Jersey driver’s test consisted of a single stop sign and a parallel parking test.
  - culopatin 5y ago
    Lol in Florida I looped around a parking lot and parked head in. From there you’re allowed to get on i95… in south Florida. I guess if you don’t die the first time you get on it it’s like passing a test anyway. Luckily for me I had been driving for a while and I was tested initially in a more rigorous country, I was just getting my license after I moved to the US, but it explains a lot of what I see in the streets.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 5y ago
  The teenager's ability to drive safely isn't just a mechanical ability of driving a car or of just being aware of the laws/rules. Safe driving comes from years of experience on being able to decide how long it will take to stop at certain speeds in certain conditions. Being able to recognize their car's brakes are a little soft and might not stop on a dime any more. Being able to recognize that the driver in front of them is potentially impaired, so best give them some space. There are plenty of things that come with experience vs book learning that makes a safer driver. A freshly licensed teen comes with none of that. They also have the natural tendency of having high risk tolerance which makes decision making different than an older/exeprienced driver that is more risk averse.
agentdrtran 5y ago
A human being is not a software or engineering project
kadoban 5y ago
That teenage driver goes through a training and certification process, and we have ways of stopping them from driving if they fuck up too badly. They also have liability for their actions. Most of those are lacking or at least inconsistent, for AI driving.
- aperson_hello 5y ago
  That's a pretty generous interpretation of the oversight for the average teenage driver. Most controls are lacking for ALL drivers, human or not. The first footage that comes out of a felony traffic stop on an AI driver will be amusing!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dfxm12 5y ago
  That teenage driver goes through a training and certification process, and we have ways of stopping them from driving if they fuck up too badly. This is a complete aside, but not having a license doesn't really prevent you from getting in a car and driving it. I was just reminded of this when a buddy's parked car was struck by a drunk driver who was not legally licensed to drive because their license was revoked from having many prior DUI's. Luckily they didn't kill anyone. Hopefully it will be easier to enforce shutting down unsafe driverless cars. I've also known teens without licenses who had to drive their irresponsible buddies' cars home after the licensed driver drove somewhere and got drunk. It's not like there's a biometric scanner in each car that verifies the person behind the wheel is a licensed driver...
  - root_axis 5y ago
    Kind of a moot point though. You can't really stop anyone from doing anything, the best we can do in a free society is create laws that deter undesirable behavior.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Or maybe we can hurry up with driverless cars so that we can take the wheel out asap for people who have DUIs.
diogenescynic 5y ago
I think elderly drivers are probably more dangerous than teenagers. Lately whenever I've seen a really reckless driver, it's been someone very elderly and who looked totally overwhelmed by the experience of driving. I've seen old people struggling to keep up with traffic, driving in bike lanes or just on the side of the road thinking it was a second lane... There should be more frequently driver exams (and car exams) in the US.
- chasd00 5y ago
  One of the more surreal things i've seen is in Naples FL where you have elderly behind the wheel of Lamborghinis, Aston Martin, Ferraris and lots of other very very powerful sports cars. Vallet needs to give them extra help getting in and out but then off they go. A simple muscle twitch blipping the gas peddle on those cars would put them so far out of control it would be funny if it weren't life threatening.

Kye 5y ago

A teenager is worried about: getting killed, killing someone else, hurting someone, wrecking their parents' car, losing their permit. I don't trust engineers working on the models that drive these cars to teach a computer the difference between a human and an open road. A teenager can discern these with no effort. I trust a teenager to care about not hitting me and try their best, and to choose a ditch over hitting someone when the decision time comes.

dgfitz 5y ago
*A teenager is worried about only about themselves and their immediate happiness
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I think you'd be immediately unhappy if you crashed your parents car
  - tremon 5y ago
    In the typical teenager's mind, that would be after, not if
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      We are discussing a hypothetical teenager who doesn't exist, who knows? Besides, I had thousands of HN karma (the most important metric of maturity of course) when I was a teenager not very long ago.
    - pempem 5y ago
      Was it an "if" in yours when you were a teenager? There are lots of strong statistical differences that are visible in the teenage population and trickle their way into insurance tables. Basically we could do a better job engendering concern from teenagers, its not some kind of inherent mental lack of capability.
      - tremon 5y ago
        My point was that worrying about hypothetical outcomes is not usually at the forefront of a teenager's mind. Sure, they will regret wrecking their parents' car, but that doesn't mean that they will avoid actions that might wreck said car.
        pempem 5y ago
        Yup, got that. Female teenagers are way less likely to have wrecks (1) and if we assume its not driven by one's genitalia and rather by their conditioning - an assumption I hold, its something that can be taught. "In 2019, the motor vehicle death rate for male drivers aged 16–19 was over two times higher than the death rate for female drivers of the same age." 1. https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendrivers_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendr...
bo1024 5y ago
To add to your point: it doesn’t bother me so much that the AI system doesn’t share these priorities. What I worry about is that the companies designing them are not incentivized to.
- ricochet11 5y ago
  surely a company is absolutely incentivized to share these priorities? every accident is a hit to their profits and pr.
  - pempem 5y ago
    I think Tesla has shown this fairly clearly to be untrue. It takes a hit if there isnt' a very solid marketing/pr/charismatic leader to distract
  - bo1024 5y ago
    No, because they can benefit even more from recklessness than the expected profit/PR damage. Someone already mentioned Tesla, but there is also the Volvo emissions scandal, Boeing's safety failures, and many more examples. At the extreme end, picture a company that manages to get an okay from the city of SF for public testing, but whose internal tests show there is a small but significant risk of serious accidents and the product needs another two years of development to be safe. Their funding runs out in one year. What do you think they would do?
culopatin 5y ago
They might be worried but suck at risk evaluation so bad that the worry doesn’t really help.

wyldfire 5y ago

Aside: I'm happy to see that teenage drivers today have a lot more required training than I did when I got my license. At least in this US state, and likely most of them. I'm also really happy about the continued advances in auto safety technology.

snovv_crash 5y ago
US driving test standards are still a joke compared to overseas.
- yc-kraln 5y ago
  There is no such thing as "US" driving test standards. Each state has its own requirements. Some are quite weak, and some are very vigorous: For instance, Maryland driving licenses are accepted 1:1 as equivalent to the German driving license, you can exchange them without an exam or test. NY and CA... do not simply transfer.
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    The interesting thing is that Maryland drivers are among the worst I've seen over a wider spectrum of factors. Sober California drivers seem pretty safe. Virginia drivers are miserable on interstates because they pass one another at 1-3mph differentials (I assume this is a response to the reputed harsh soeeding enforcement there) and are victims of often-wrong signage, but are otherwise uninteresting. South Carolina drivers cause dangerous situations by trying to give away their right of way. Maryland drivers aggressively fight back agaibst merges, change lanes erratically, and crash in a quarter inch of snow at shocking rates, despite the fact that their salt trucks have higher mass-flow-rates than their snow storms. The only drivers who stand out vs Maryland are in big military areas where there's a significant minority of people driving 20mph faster than traffic and merging erratically while doing so.
    - quartz 5y ago
      I think it's more a Baltimore / DC area issue than a Maryland one. Baltimore consistently ranks dead last in best driver reports with DC right behind: https://www.allstate.com/americas-best-drivers/index.htm https://www.allstate.com/americas-best-drivers/index.htm The commuting structure of those cities is just awful and begging for road rage.

ISL 5y ago

And every drunk/elderly driver -- the car's decision to move after a traffic-stop felt very much the behavior of someone with impaired cognition.

fho 5y ago
Anecdote: There was an old lady living nearby who despite being 80+ years still driving around in her 20 year old car. She literally ran over traffic cones and ... a child on a tricycle [1] and never got prosecuted. She recently passed away ... sad, but the streets around here are definitely safer now. (This was in Germany just for reference) [1] The child was fine it was a low speed collision ... but still ...
- yardie 5y ago
  There was recently an accident in Miami Beach. Elderly woman driving a Bentley reversed into a terrace restaurant. Killing 1 and injury 6, including a 3yo [0]. No charges filed because being senile driver (and voter) is not against the law. [0] https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/02/25/recalling-tragic-scene-day-after-woman-backs-into-south-beach-dining-area-kills-1/ https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/02/25/recalling-trag...
  - jen20 5y ago
    In the UK there’s a catch all for this called “driving without due care and attention”.
- argiopetech 5y ago
  I caution against age as a sole proxy for driving ability. As a contradictory datum, my 80+ year old grandmother (in the USA) maintains a 100+ acre farm. She daily drives a (impeccably maintained) 2006 3/4 ton pickup, to include multiple yearly 10+ hour trips hauling a 10k+ lbs trailer. She almost always brings a passenger on these trips for companionship and safety. I've never heard any complaints, and never personally observed her driving unsafely. It won't be this way forever, and I'm under no illusion that she is the norm for her age, but I'd hazard she's a better drive R than most people on the road. I would like to see a move toward more frequent driver testing for all drivers in the USA, decreasing in frequency after the first few years of driving and increasing in frequency for older drivers. Testing after initial licensing is not the norm in any state I've inhabited, so this would probably require a significant uphill battle on both the individual and government fronts.

boudin 5y ago

A teenage driver can lose its licence. What happens with an AI in this case? Can Cruise lose its licence ?

striking 5y ago
Yes.
moralestapia 5y ago
Who gets a license, though? Cruise, the company? The currently deployed algorithm? Each car w/ the software?
xadhominemx 5y ago
> Can Cruise lose its licence ? Of course

eps 5y ago

Depends on the country, but here teenagers are drilled so much during their L phase and on the cars with a manual transmission, so they are probably the safest drivers on the road.

brianwawok 5y ago
Not true at all in the US. (And no, kids don't learn the manual because no one uses manuals in the US) https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/aaa_fig1.png https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/aaa_fig... Teens are roughly 3x worse than a 20 year old, and 10x worse than a 50 year old.
yawnr 5y ago
Yeah definitely not the case in the US. The New Jersey driver’s test consisted of a single stop sign and a parallel parking test.
- culopatin 5y ago
  Lol in Florida I looped around a parking lot and parked head in. From there you’re allowed to get on i95… in south Florida. I guess if you don’t die the first time you get on it it’s like passing a test anyway. Luckily for me I had been driving for a while and I was tested initially in a more rigorous country, I was just getting my license after I moved to the US, but it explains a lot of what I see in the streets.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 5y ago
The teenager's ability to drive safely isn't just a mechanical ability of driving a car or of just being aware of the laws/rules. Safe driving comes from years of experience on being able to decide how long it will take to stop at certain speeds in certain conditions. Being able to recognize their car's brakes are a little soft and might not stop on a dime any more. Being able to recognize that the driver in front of them is potentially impaired, so best give them some space. There are plenty of things that come with experience vs book learning that makes a safer driver. A freshly licensed teen comes with none of that. They also have the natural tendency of having high risk tolerance which makes decision making different than an older/exeprienced driver that is more risk averse.

agentdrtran 5y ago

A human being is not a software or engineering project

kadoban 5y ago

That teenage driver goes through a training and certification process, and we have ways of stopping them from driving if they fuck up too badly. They also have liability for their actions. Most of those are lacking or at least inconsistent, for AI driving.

aperson_hello 5y ago
That's a pretty generous interpretation of the oversight for the average teenage driver. Most controls are lacking for ALL drivers, human or not. The first footage that comes out of a felony traffic stop on an AI driver will be amusing!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dfxm12 5y ago
That teenage driver goes through a training and certification process, and we have ways of stopping them from driving if they fuck up too badly. This is a complete aside, but not having a license doesn't really prevent you from getting in a car and driving it. I was just reminded of this when a buddy's parked car was struck by a drunk driver who was not legally licensed to drive because their license was revoked from having many prior DUI's. Luckily they didn't kill anyone. Hopefully it will be easier to enforce shutting down unsafe driverless cars. I've also known teens without licenses who had to drive their irresponsible buddies' cars home after the licensed driver drove somewhere and got drunk. It's not like there's a biometric scanner in each car that verifies the person behind the wheel is a licensed driver...
- root_axis 5y ago
  Kind of a moot point though. You can't really stop anyone from doing anything, the best we can do in a free society is create laws that deter undesirable behavior.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Or maybe we can hurry up with driverless cars so that we can take the wheel out asap for people who have DUIs.

diogenescynic 5y ago

I think elderly drivers are probably more dangerous than teenagers. Lately whenever I've seen a really reckless driver, it's been someone very elderly and who looked totally overwhelmed by the experience of driving. I've seen old people struggling to keep up with traffic, driving in bike lanes or just on the side of the road thinking it was a second lane... There should be more frequently driver exams (and car exams) in the US.

chasd00 5y ago
One of the more surreal things i've seen is in Naples FL where you have elderly behind the wheel of Lamborghinis, Aston Martin, Ferraris and lots of other very very powerful sports cars. Vallet needs to give them extra help getting in and out but then off they go. A simple muscle twitch blipping the gas peddle on those cars would put them so far out of control it would be funny if it weren't life threatening.