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The problem is that whenever a human driven car reverses over a toddler or wraps around a telephone pole or veers across lanes into oncoming traffic or blows th

The problem is that whenever a human driven car reverses over a toddler or wraps around a telephone pole or veers across lanes into oncoming traffic or blows through a red light and T-bones someone, nobody cares because it happens all the time, but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard. It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.

shash 3y ago
The liability problem is important here - when someone reverses over a toddler, someone gets sued. Or they lose their license. Or $CONSEQUENCE. What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet? The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...
- chii 3y ago
  > you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human i think this is already proven true empiracally with the existing milage and rates of accidents. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-lower-than-us-average-with-fsd/ https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-l... (or from here https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-systems-are-safer-than-a-human-but-is-it-really-so/ https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-..., which quotes various sources of data, unless tesla is lying about their FSD data they reported). Humans just don't believe in autodriving, and there's still the problem of liability assignment - both aren't a technology problem imho, but a human impediment to adoption.
  - wartijn_ 3y ago
    That’s not data about autonomous vehicles. Tesla’s fsd is a feature where the car drives itself during some parts of a trip. The driver is always supposed to keep paying attention and sometimes take over control. To show that autonomous cars are better drivers than humans you need data from autonomous cars in the same situation as human drivers. And that data doesn’t exist (yet), because truly autonomous cars don’t drive in all places and situations where humans do.
  - shash 3y ago
    The second of your links says "According to the folks over at Jalopnik though, the bar for “safer than a human” is probably a lot higher than one might guess. In fact, after crunching numbers from the NHTSA, it seems as though drivers avoid crashes 99.999819 percent of the time. If Tesla’s data is to be believed, it’s already surpassed that." Are you even making a statistically significant comparison at this point? And there are these also: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblower-leak-fsd-complaints-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo... Quite apart from the fact that this isn't actual self-driving that's being measured (as sibling points out).
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. It's not "fair" that this is the case, It is exactly fair - if a drunk guy in Australia is driving one car. If he hits a child, that has no relevance to my life in EU. He will be arrested and dealt with. But Tesla autopilot drives millions if cars. It if hits a child in Australia, it does not get arrested. Its also gonna drive over my children in EU.
- chii 3y ago
  > Its also gonna drive over my children in EU. a false equivalency. The same type of bozo that reverses into a child also exists in europe.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    Himans have separate brains. The Aitopilot runs same code. If autopilot has error in the code that makes it drive off cliffs, that affects made pople.
    - digbybk 3y ago
      This is the advantage of self driving. If there is an error it gets fixed for all cars in the fleet. Humans have bugs - we get bored, we get distracted, we get angry, we thrill seek, etc - and we’ll never fix our bugs. Nor should we. Any technology that requires humans to be perfect all the time to be safe is an inhuman technology. I think people will look back at fully human drive cars, and the death rate we tolerate from it, with disbelief.

shash 3y ago

The liability problem is important here - when someone reverses over a toddler, someone gets sued. Or they lose their license. Or $CONSEQUENCE. What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet? The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...

chii 3y ago
> you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human i think this is already proven true empiracally with the existing milage and rates of accidents. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-lower-than-us-average-with-fsd/ https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-l... (or from here https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-systems-are-safer-than-a-human-but-is-it-really-so/ https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-..., which quotes various sources of data, unless tesla is lying about their FSD data they reported). Humans just don't believe in autodriving, and there's still the problem of liability assignment - both aren't a technology problem imho, but a human impediment to adoption.
- wartijn_ 3y ago
  That’s not data about autonomous vehicles. Tesla’s fsd is a feature where the car drives itself during some parts of a trip. The driver is always supposed to keep paying attention and sometimes take over control. To show that autonomous cars are better drivers than humans you need data from autonomous cars in the same situation as human drivers. And that data doesn’t exist (yet), because truly autonomous cars don’t drive in all places and situations where humans do.
- shash 3y ago
  The second of your links says "According to the folks over at Jalopnik though, the bar for “safer than a human” is probably a lot higher than one might guess. In fact, after crunching numbers from the NHTSA, it seems as though drivers avoid crashes 99.999819 percent of the time. If Tesla’s data is to be believed, it’s already surpassed that." Are you even making a statistically significant comparison at this point? And there are these also: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblower-leak-fsd-complaints-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo... Quite apart from the fact that this isn't actual self-driving that's being measured (as sibling points out).

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. It's not "fair" that this is the case, It is exactly fair - if a drunk guy in Australia is driving one car. If he hits a child, that has no relevance to my life in EU. He will be arrested and dealt with. But Tesla autopilot drives millions if cars. It if hits a child in Australia, it does not get arrested. Its also gonna drive over my children in EU.

chii 3y ago
> Its also gonna drive over my children in EU. a false equivalency. The same type of bozo that reverses into a child also exists in europe.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Himans have separate brains. The Aitopilot runs same code. If autopilot has error in the code that makes it drive off cliffs, that affects made pople.
  - digbybk 3y ago
    This is the advantage of self driving. If there is an error it gets fixed for all cars in the fleet. Humans have bugs - we get bored, we get distracted, we get angry, we thrill seek, etc - and we’ll never fix our bugs. Nor should we. Any technology that requires humans to be perfect all the time to be safe is an inhuman technology. I think people will look back at fully human drive cars, and the death rate we tolerate from it, with disbelief.