3 ms·

> To note, this is as much an engineering problem as it is societal and legislative. Yeah, it definitely is. I think there are two things that should happen.

> To note, this is as much an engineering problem as it is societal and legislative. Yeah, it definitely is. I think there are two things that should happen. In the short term, producers of self-driving cars (or systems) should be given immunity from lawsuits related to crashes provided that the NHTSA (or some other authority) can verify that the deaths per passenger mile in their cars does not exceed the rate for traditional cars. Once the majority of passenger miles are in self-driven cars, revoke the immunity. For the long term, software engineering should become a real engineering discipline and we require self-driving systems be signed off by licensed Professional Engineers. If those engineers ship software with bugs that lead to death or damage, those engineers can be held responsible, sued for malpractice, and have their license to practice revoked.

notahacker 4y ago
I'm not sure that the political 'solution' of giving special privileges to avoid immediate consequences from their actions to AV manufacturers and special responsibility for signoff in the longer term solves the engineering problem that they need each minor version update of their software to have driven tens of billions of real world miles before they remotely approach statistically significant evidence that it is less deadly than the last version, or indeed an average human. And this is where lack of general AI or tractability is an issue; knowing that the software typically makes fewer driving errors than the last version over a typical route gives us no confidence whatsoever it doesn't handle rare edge cases marginally worse leading to a couple of extra fatalities per billion miles (making it less safe than the average driver, many of whom suffer actual legal consequences for their erratic driving killing a person even if all their other driving is 'above average'...). Humans aren't bug-free or particularly tractable either, but at least we have enough of a mental model of how they understand driving to be confident that training them on a certain road sign found in urban areas won't make them more likely to stop on a freeway.

notahacker 4y ago

I'm not sure that the political 'solution' of giving special privileges to avoid immediate consequences from their actions to AV manufacturers and special responsibility for signoff in the longer term solves the engineering problem that they need each minor version update of their software to have driven tens of billions of real world miles before they remotely approach statistically significant evidence that it is less deadly than the last version, or indeed an average human. And this is where lack of general AI or tractability is an issue; knowing that the software typically makes fewer driving errors than the last version over a typical route gives us no confidence whatsoever it doesn't handle rare edge cases marginally worse leading to a couple of extra fatalities per billion miles (making it less safe than the average driver, many of whom suffer actual legal consequences for their erratic driving killing a person even if all their other driving is 'above average'...). Humans aren't bug-free or particularly tractable either, but at least we have enough of a mental model of how they understand driving to be confident that training them on a certain road sign found in urban areas won't make them more likely to stop on a freeway.