4 ms·

It’s abundantly clear that we are going to expect near-perfect reliability from autonomous vehicles. This isn’t necessarily illogical; they operate in a differe

It’s abundantly clear that we are going to expect near-perfect reliability from autonomous vehicles. This isn’t necessarily illogical; they operate in a different context than humans do. We expect humans to make mistakes and we have various ways of dealing with the consequences (eg lawsuits targeted at the responsible individual). The argument from statistics doesn’t appear likely to win the kind of societal approval we need for autonomous vehicles to be accepted.

dcow 4y ago
Your point about liability is valid, but it’s far from “abundantly clear” that society needs machines to be near perfect as opposed to just significantly better than humans. Solve the liability problem and I would 100% take a machine that performs 30% better than a human or helps a human perform 30% better every time because it means fewer humans die on the road.
- spiderice 4y ago
  > Your point about liability is valid How is it valid? It's currently a solved problem. The driver of the car is still held liable because they are still, ultimately, driving the car. Tesla's with autopilot seem to make drivers safer, and acting like we don't know who is liable in the event of a crash is just a red herring.
  - dcow 4y ago
    I meant for fully autonomous systems, but yeah I agree with you.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > I would 100% take a machine that performs 30% better than a human or helps a human perform 30% better every time because it means fewer humans die on the road. It's surprisingly hard to establish those parameters though, since (i) the more meaningful indicators of good performance (driver error fatalities) happen only every million or so miles, even less frequently once you've narrowed your pool down to errors made by sober drivers that weren't racing or attempting to driver in conditions unsuited to electronic assistance, so that's a lot of real world road use required to establish statistically significant evidence a machine is a 30% or so safe than a human driver (ii) complex software doesn't improve monotonically, so really you need that amount of testing per update to be confident that the next minor version of something "30% safer" hasn't introduced regression bugs which mean that it is now a bit worse than the average driver and (iii) performance in different road conditions is likely highly variable such that it might be both 30% better overall and 30x as likely to cause an accident if not disengaged in that particular circumstance. To make a valid assessment of the overall safety impact, you'd also have to factor in that (iv) the worst drivers who skew the stats are the generally the ones least likely to buy it and (v) if it's fully autonomous driving, road use would increase substantially and whilst that may have other benefits the likely outcome from substantial increase in miles driven using tech that's only marginally better than a human is more humans dying on the road
  - dcow 4y ago
    Billions of miles are driven every day.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      And yet the total mileage driven by a huge variety of autonomous systems over research programmes dating back a decade is of the order of 20-30 million. This disparity obviously supports my point about the difficulty of establishing statistically significant evidence that a particular software update on a particular platform is less lethal than the human driver [in a given set of circumstances] based on events which are very rare on a per mile basis, particularly if the baseline performance gap isn't that large. The fact that overall road use is so high that a sufficiently bad regression bug in sufficiently widely-deployed software could rack up a massive body count within hours obviously doesn't make the case for introducing something believed to only be a marginal improvement any stronger.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> We expect humans to make mistakes and we have various ways of dealing with the consequences (eg lawsuits targeted at the responsible individual). The same is true of manufacturers and others in the chain of commerce of goods (see, e.g., the general rules on defective product liability), even where they aren’t individual humans. There’s nothing about AI which makes it particularly special in this regard.

dcow 4y ago

Your point about liability is valid, but it’s far from “abundantly clear” that society needs machines to be near perfect as opposed to just significantly better than humans. Solve the liability problem and I would 100% take a machine that performs 30% better than a human or helps a human perform 30% better every time because it means fewer humans die on the road.

spiderice 4y ago
> Your point about liability is valid How is it valid? It's currently a solved problem. The driver of the car is still held liable because they are still, ultimately, driving the car. Tesla's with autopilot seem to make drivers safer, and acting like we don't know who is liable in the event of a crash is just a red herring.
- dcow 4y ago
  I meant for fully autonomous systems, but yeah I agree with you.
notahacker 4y ago
> I would 100% take a machine that performs 30% better than a human or helps a human perform 30% better every time because it means fewer humans die on the road. It's surprisingly hard to establish those parameters though, since (i) the more meaningful indicators of good performance (driver error fatalities) happen only every million or so miles, even less frequently once you've narrowed your pool down to errors made by sober drivers that weren't racing or attempting to driver in conditions unsuited to electronic assistance, so that's a lot of real world road use required to establish statistically significant evidence a machine is a 30% or so safe than a human driver (ii) complex software doesn't improve monotonically, so really you need that amount of testing per update to be confident that the next minor version of something "30% safer" hasn't introduced regression bugs which mean that it is now a bit worse than the average driver and (iii) performance in different road conditions is likely highly variable such that it might be both 30% better overall and 30x as likely to cause an accident if not disengaged in that particular circumstance. To make a valid assessment of the overall safety impact, you'd also have to factor in that (iv) the worst drivers who skew the stats are the generally the ones least likely to buy it and (v) if it's fully autonomous driving, road use would increase substantially and whilst that may have other benefits the likely outcome from substantial increase in miles driven using tech that's only marginally better than a human is more humans dying on the road
- dcow 4y ago
  Billions of miles are driven every day.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    And yet the total mileage driven by a huge variety of autonomous systems over research programmes dating back a decade is of the order of 20-30 million. This disparity obviously supports my point about the difficulty of establishing statistically significant evidence that a particular software update on a particular platform is less lethal than the human driver [in a given set of circumstances] based on events which are very rare on a per mile basis, particularly if the baseline performance gap isn't that large. The fact that overall road use is so high that a sufficiently bad regression bug in sufficiently widely-deployed software could rack up a massive body count within hours obviously doesn't make the case for introducing something believed to only be a marginal improvement any stronger.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> We expect humans to make mistakes and we have various ways of dealing with the consequences (eg lawsuits targeted at the responsible individual). The same is true of manufacturers and others in the chain of commerce of goods (see, e.g., the general rules on defective product liability), even where they aren’t individual humans. There’s nothing about AI which makes it particularly special in this regard.