3 ms·

Who’s Afraid of Driverless Cars?

2 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

labrador 4y ago
I don't think safety is the highest priority for most drivers. If it were, cars with the highest safety rating would sell best. Safety is a concern, but there are other concerns about self-driving vehicles that I think give more reason for pause. If you offered me a fully self-driving vehicle at a regular car price that lacked a steering wheel and brake pedals and told me my chances of serious injury or death would be reduced by 50% (or more) I wouldn't take it. Part of being a free person is feeling like you are in control and the car described above takes away control. You're asking me to trust your software, trust your QA department and trust that you've considered everything that could go wrong in the place I will do most of my driving. That's a tall order. I would immediately picture the car driving me on rain soaked roads in the Santa Cruz mountains plunging me off a cliff into the redwood trees, much like people who refuse to fly picture themselves helplessly diving into the ground in a ball of flames. Once in a blue moon the roads in the Santa Cruz mountains ice up. How well did you test your car in these conditions? Without any data, I'm going to assume you didn't. People enjoy the freedom to take risks. People break the traffic laws all the time after assessing the risks of doing so. People enjoy going fast, even though statistically speaking, it is safer to go slow.
- telchior 4y ago
  This seems like playing with semantics. You could say safety isn't a priority, or that it's the highest priority, depending on what you define as "safety". It's actually interesting that discussions about why people don't feel safe when they're not the driver are usually not very coherent. Fear of flying is the classic one: you have zero control, including the lack of ability to end the experience. Somehow, despite a century of commercial flight, aviophobia / aerophobia is still poorly understood and hasn't been studied very thoroughly. As a result, some fairly ludicrous explanations get tossed around, for instance that the fear is all due to claustrophobia (even in people who aren't otherwise claustrophobic) or lack of understanding of physics (barely anyone really understands physics, but no physics-illiterate person gets scared by, say, walking down a flight of stairs). Maybe in your case you really are distrustful because of an entirely rational understanding of how software is made and what edge cases are. But like physics, very few normal people have any understanding of building software. And like flying, the real reason that the vast majority of people aren't -- and probably won't be, for a long time -- comfortable with self-driving cars is simply, lack of control. "Safety" is not really the relevant problem here. Lack of control is. One horrifying, highly publicized accident a year could completely put off the entire population from self-driving, nevermind if the safety of self-driving is two, ten or a thousand times better than human controlled.
  - labrador 4y ago
    > "Safety" is not really the relevant problem here. Lack of control is. That's what I said

2 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

I don't think safety is the highest priority for most drivers. If it were, cars with the highest safety rating would sell best. Safety is a concern, but there are other concerns about self-driving vehicles that I think give more reason for pause. If you offered me a fully self-driving vehicle at a regular car price that lacked a steering wheel and brake pedals and told me my chances of serious injury or death would be reduced by 50% (or more) I wouldn't take it. Part of being a free person is feeling like you are in control and the car described above takes away control. You're asking me to trust your software, trust your QA department and trust that you've considered everything that could go wrong in the place I will do most of my driving. That's a tall order. I would immediately picture the car driving me on rain soaked roads in the Santa Cruz mountains plunging me off a cliff into the redwood trees, much like people who refuse to fly picture themselves helplessly diving into the ground in a ball of flames. Once in a blue moon the roads in the Santa Cruz mountains ice up. How well did you test your car in these conditions? Without any data, I'm going to assume you didn't. People enjoy the freedom to take risks. People break the traffic laws all the time after assessing the risks of doing so. People enjoy going fast, even though statistically speaking, it is safer to go slow.

telchior 4y ago
This seems like playing with semantics. You could say safety isn't a priority, or that it's the highest priority, depending on what you define as "safety". It's actually interesting that discussions about why people don't feel safe when they're not the driver are usually not very coherent. Fear of flying is the classic one: you have zero control, including the lack of ability to end the experience. Somehow, despite a century of commercial flight, aviophobia / aerophobia is still poorly understood and hasn't been studied very thoroughly. As a result, some fairly ludicrous explanations get tossed around, for instance that the fear is all due to claustrophobia (even in people who aren't otherwise claustrophobic) or lack of understanding of physics (barely anyone really understands physics, but no physics-illiterate person gets scared by, say, walking down a flight of stairs). Maybe in your case you really are distrustful because of an entirely rational understanding of how software is made and what edge cases are. But like physics, very few normal people have any understanding of building software. And like flying, the real reason that the vast majority of people aren't -- and probably won't be, for a long time -- comfortable with self-driving cars is simply, lack of control. "Safety" is not really the relevant problem here. Lack of control is. One horrifying, highly publicized accident a year could completely put off the entire population from self-driving, nevermind if the safety of self-driving is two, ten or a thousand times better than human controlled.
- labrador 4y ago
  > "Safety" is not really the relevant problem here. Lack of control is. That's what I said