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Self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives a year and hundreds of thousands of expensive fender-benders, whether due to sleepiness, inattention, or

Self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives a year and hundreds of thousands of expensive fender-benders, whether due to sleepiness, inattention, or drunk driving. The algorithms don't have to be perfect to stop a sleepy driver from slamming into a minivan. That's one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time. Being "pretty well served by public transport" and uninterested in that improvement is self-absorbed. Going on about how it's useless in a public forum? Yes. That's the inflection point and Adams pointed it out because it's narcissistic and sad. If you can't empathize enough to care about all the people self-driving will help, who aren't you, then you've lost something.

withinboredom 4y ago
Self driving cars could also kill everyone on the road from a single bug. A single bug is amplified a million times over vs a single person’s mistake only affects that single person. Overall, I’m looking forward to it, but I probably will never trust it fully with my life.
stonogo 4y ago
> Self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives a year and hundreds of thousands of expensive fender-benders, whether due to sleepiness, inattention, or drunk driving. This claim is the part of self-driving cars that has become boring. People keep making it, but they never specify when, nor do we get any information about whether full-self-driving is really that big a safety leap over the automatic braking and lane assist that we have already had for a decade or more. Meanwhile there remains no appreciable effect on the slope of the graph for annual deaths per vehicle miles traveled.
macintux 4y ago
> The algorithms don't have to be perfect to stop a sleepy driver from slamming into a minivan. No, but if they don’t stop for a stopped emergency vehicle, or do stop for no obvious reason, then drivers are stuck closely monitoring the car at all times waiting to take control without warning. Which, to my mind, is worse than just being in control at all times.
hakfoo 4y ago
I worry there's going to be a "the perfect is the enemy of the good" problem with self-driving. There will reach a point, likely soon, where on a damage per million kilometres level, a self-driver is safer than an average human, and eventually a good human driver. But I worry it will take years and years extra to get self-driving legally approved, because people will hang up on the corner cases where the best human drivers under ideal circumstances could avoid an incident the self-driver fails. I sort of hope the insurance industry will take the vanguard here, because they can see the "claims per million kilometres" number and get less hung up on the "my specific individual experience was bad" anecdata.

withinboredom 4y ago

Self driving cars could also kill everyone on the road from a single bug. A single bug is amplified a million times over vs a single person’s mistake only affects that single person. Overall, I’m looking forward to it, but I probably will never trust it fully with my life.

stonogo 4y ago

> Self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives a year and hundreds of thousands of expensive fender-benders, whether due to sleepiness, inattention, or drunk driving. This claim is the part of self-driving cars that has become boring. People keep making it, but they never specify when, nor do we get any information about whether full-self-driving is really that big a safety leap over the automatic braking and lane assist that we have already had for a decade or more. Meanwhile there remains no appreciable effect on the slope of the graph for annual deaths per vehicle miles traveled.

macintux 4y ago

> The algorithms don't have to be perfect to stop a sleepy driver from slamming into a minivan. No, but if they don’t stop for a stopped emergency vehicle, or do stop for no obvious reason, then drivers are stuck closely monitoring the car at all times waiting to take control without warning. Which, to my mind, is worse than just being in control at all times.

hakfoo 4y ago

I worry there's going to be a "the perfect is the enemy of the good" problem with self-driving. There will reach a point, likely soon, where on a damage per million kilometres level, a self-driver is safer than an average human, and eventually a good human driver. But I worry it will take years and years extra to get self-driving legally approved, because people will hang up on the corner cases where the best human drivers under ideal circumstances could avoid an incident the self-driver fails. I sort of hope the insurance industry will take the vanguard here, because they can see the "claims per million kilometres" number and get less hung up on the "my specific individual experience was bad" anecdata.