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> Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want

> Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple modalities so that a car crash isn’t an accident, it’s a choice.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
> we’re pretty bad at driving Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are. For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1] More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there. Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
- notahacker 4y ago
  It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1]. 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time. I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
- bsder 4y ago
  Germany has WAY more difficult driving licensing standards than the US. My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that. Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot. Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.
CSMastermind 4y ago
> Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. I disagree that humans are bad at driving. Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's statistically a better driver than a human? And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here. 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here? In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove that year. Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a mile driven is low: 0.00000109% To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving car is better at driving than a human it would need to drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13 years.
- thrashh 4y ago
  Not all humans are the same either Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they change lanes, despite driving for 10 years It’s a bell curve and I think the median is better than current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I think it shifts the bell curve up a lot
  - diffxx 4y ago
    I think part of the problem is the lax licensing standards in the US. For everyone's benefit, we should have higher standards. There also can and should be regional differences. Someone who has learned to drive in a rural or suburban area has not necessarily had the training and experience necessary to safely drive in a city alongside pedestrians and cyclists.
    - thrashh 4y ago
      I think we’re not really willing to up the standards because you need to drive to survive in a lot of places. You can’t change your genetics, you can’t necessarily change where you live, and you can’t just fix transit without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to build so the standards are just what they have to be Over the last many decades, we’ve starting requiring things like backup cameras because cars naturally break down and so it’s something we can actually change on a short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost) Fixing transit is a long timescale thing

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago

> we’re pretty bad at driving Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are. For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1] More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there. Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

notahacker 4y ago
It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.
ryandrake 4y ago
When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1]. 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time. I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
bsder 4y ago
Germany has WAY more difficult driving licensing standards than the US. My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that. Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot. Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.

CSMastermind 4y ago

> Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. I disagree that humans are bad at driving. Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's statistically a better driver than a human? And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here. 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here? In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove that year. Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a mile driven is low: 0.00000109% To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving car is better at driving than a human it would need to drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13 years.

thrashh 4y ago
Not all humans are the same either Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they change lanes, despite driving for 10 years It’s a bell curve and I think the median is better than current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I think it shifts the bell curve up a lot
- diffxx 4y ago
  I think part of the problem is the lax licensing standards in the US. For everyone's benefit, we should have higher standards. There also can and should be regional differences. Someone who has learned to drive in a rural or suburban area has not necessarily had the training and experience necessary to safely drive in a city alongside pedestrians and cyclists.
  - thrashh 4y ago
    I think we’re not really willing to up the standards because you need to drive to survive in a lot of places. You can’t change your genetics, you can’t necessarily change where you live, and you can’t just fix transit without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to build so the standards are just what they have to be Over the last many decades, we’ve starting requiring things like backup cameras because cars naturally break down and so it’s something we can actually change on a short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost) Fixing transit is a long timescale thing