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I know this article is satire, but it certainly strikes a chord. Putting big metal robots capable of moving at highway speed in close proximity to squishy human

I know this article is satire, but it certainly strikes a chord. Putting big metal robots capable of moving at highway speed in close proximity to squishy humans is going to cause issues. It might be the human's fault. It might be the vehicle's fault. It might be completely unrelated. However, there are industries like aviation that take these issues seriously. They're investigated, reported, and learned from. We need to do the same for autonomous vehicles if they're actually going to be safe. This means we need an open, independent body outside of industry control, like the NTSB or NHTSA that can produce in depth, transparent, and publicly available reports that manufacturers can't bury or buy away. On the other side, we, the (future) passengers need to be conscious of these safety issues. We need to hold companies accountable for fixing flaws in autonomous vehicles. Airplane accidents can be spectacularly big, which captivates the public. I'm worried that car accidents will just be too small for enough people to care, and therefore we will continue to have a trickle of fatalities in every city and we will never be free from cars.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > However, there are industries like aviation that take these issues seriously. They're investigated, reported, and learned from If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world would come to a screeching halt standstill. And besides they do it to protect the 200M plane not the passengers because those same passengers enter in the subway or a mall or a stadium or a train 15 mins after they disembark from the 200M plane, and they could bring (or face someone with) an assault rifle without facing any screening or x-rays or even an ID check I don’t like self driving cars but if the bar to plow ahead with deployment of a new tech is commercial aviation post 9/11 then we can call the end of technological improvement already.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  There's a lot of speculation here: aviation manages to be simultaneously extremely safe and a cornerstone of the global economy. It's unclear why other modes of transportation can't do the same; more precisely, it's unclear why private cars get put in the "acceptably dangerous" bucket when just about everything else is astoundingly safe (trains, planes, public & private buses, etc.). (Independently: the bigger reason the FAA and airlines take security seriously is because consumers demand that they do, not just because the planes themselves are expensive. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk.)
  - IanCal 3y ago
    Cars are extremely safe. They're driven by barely trained humans which causes the problems. Give only a small fraction of people the ability to drive after significant training, and make driving their full time job, and you'll probably see crashes decline significantly.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    This is why I think we should never have brought in unleaded gasoline. Flying still uses leaded gasoline because regulations are written in blood. Pretty insane that we just let car manufacturers switch to this when a properly regulated transportation system would never consider such a high risk operation. It’s probably best we return to the tried, true, and most importantly safe system: leaded gasoline.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      This is clearly meant to be sarcasm, but I think you've got your facts wrong: commercial jet airplanes don't use leaded gasoline. They use Jet-A and similar formulations, which are essentially just kerosene[1] and contain no lead[2]. (I think you're thinking of avgas, which is used by piston-driven engines. These don't appear much in commercial aviation anymore.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel [2]: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-environment https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-enviro...
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        Regulated by the same organization for good reason. Personal aircraft to line up with personal cars.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    > > Aviation manages to be simultaneously extremely safe and a cornerstone of the global economy Because physics gives it such a huge advantage that it allows aviation to sit on its lead and waste some speed to pursue safety and still beat trains even where trains are very efficient and dense such as Europe. It remains to be seen what will happen now that Japan is about to enter a phase of quasi-jet speed type trains. The fact that every time you board on a plane you are treated like a criminal who is about to enter prision is unacceptable and would have never been unacceptable in the 1980s regardless of what would have happened terrorism-wise. Matter of fact the 80s were the peak era of terrorism > > consumers demand that they do....Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk Of course....and of course. A rational person's preoccupation should be reducing the chances to die from any cause, because once you are dead it's not that important what was the cause, doesn't it? It's very irrational to put heavy pressure on airlines and airports when 15 minutes after you exit from the terminal you enter in a mall and some neo-Nazi can absolutely blow up your brain with an assault rifle they bought without having to do not even an ID check, and I mean blow you up to the tune that your family members cannot even hold an open casket cerimony. > > it's unclear why private cars get put in the "acceptably dangerous" Because driving is a very powerful action, you turn the wheel right and the car goes right, turn left and it goes left, accelerate and it will speed up, break and it will come to a halt. It makes people feel very powerful and in control, people feel in control not only conceptually but in a limbic way, so they demand way less safety standards. Trains don't give that feeling because people aren't driving but people can at least wrap their minds around trains as vehicles, commercial passenger planes look so big and feel so gross and non suitable for flight that people are very suspicious of them. Nobody is afraid of cars, trains or ships, but fear of flight is one of the most common fears. Commercial passenger plaens after 9/11 forget about it you get to the aforementioned current day scenario where you are treated like a criminal every time you are boarding a plane
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world would come to a screeching halt standstill. Trains are just about as safe as planes. Busses too. It's really just cars that are a major outlier. [1] [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
- Veserv 3y ago
  Not everything, just things that can kill hundreds to thousands of people if they go wrong. That is safety engineering 101; identify the important and critical parts and do those parts better and more carefully. You do not need to uniformly improve all elements to the same high standards as long as you can isolate them from the safety-critical path. This is a necessity because, as you point out, doing everything to the high standards is economically infeasible. But doing everything to economical standards is mass murder. No one standard works for the entire system, so you must isolate and apply the correct amount of effort for each component. This is a very weird concept for most software developers because most software is a big mushy ball of spaghetti where it is impossible to isolate or even identify the critical path. Luckily, those individuals largely do not develop safety-critical systems, so the lack of knowledge of basic safety processes does not hinder their deployments or result in a danger to public safety. What is problematic is when those people start doing safety critical systems. That is how you get the ideas being satirized by the article. Acting as if there is nothing in between total recklessness and impossibly perfect safety, so there is no choice but criminal recklessness. Basic industry-standard processes are, in fact, like 6 orders of magnitude safer during development and increase development velocity toward a safe, working product. Any viewpoint as insane as normalizing deaths during the development process is totally incompatible with successfully deploying a safety critical product. Deaths may be unavoidable due to the sheer weight of statistics, but deaths are always a failure of immense gravity. A flippant disregard for human life has no place on a safety critical product.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    > > Not everything, just things that can kill hundreds to thousands of people if they go wrong The original Al Quaeda plan for the WTC was to detonate explosives to tear it down, they tried in the 90s but of course they were so inept that they just made a huge mess in the parking lot. However let's say they succeded. Do you think we'd have checkpoints looking for explosives (or even components to make explosives) while entering Manhattan and all the 1000 odd major global cities which exceed 1M population? There is a thing with flight. Planes look so big and so gross and like they should not be able to fly and so people are scared of them, fear of flight is one of the most common fear. In the post 9/11 world add to that being under a plane, in the proximity of a plane or in a builing from which a plane can be seen. None of this stuff happens with trains and they too can kill thousands.
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  The commenter you're responding to is talking about aeronautical engineering safety practices (things like DO-178), not TSA-style security. If you haven't worked in the aerospace sector, it's hard to appreciate just how slow, methodical, and bureaucratic things are.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
~40k people die in the US from human caused car accidents every year (~12.9 deaths per 100,000 people, ~1.37 deaths per 100 million miles traveled), and we're getting squeamish about the robot that never gets tired, drunk, or inattentive? If you want to be free from cars, build walkable and carless cities people can afford and want to move to. We can then discuss sunsetting mass automobile infra (which is very unlikely, although infra spending can be weighted to more efficient urban development, mass transit, bicycle infra, etc vs automobile centric systems). Until then, the need for autonomous vehicles is an inconvenient truth. > This means we need an open, independent body outside of industry control, like the NTSB or NHTSA that can produce in depth, transparent, and publicly available reports that manufacturers can't bury or buy away. Strongly agree.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  > 40k people You're jumping to a quantitative comparison because that's simpler and more obvious, but the right way to think about it is qualitatively. We have over half a century of understanding of modern human driving patterns. We know the ceiling on the number of accidents/deaths that humans will cause. We know that if it changes, it will change slowly. AI works differently. An update to code or models wipes out all expectations we've learned from prior versions. In short, the entire fleet of autonomous vehicles can change behavior overnight with a software update and become murder tanks. Nothing will ever happen to all human drivers at once. Some small percentage will be drunk at any given time. We'll never all wake up with a new drunk version of ourselves at the same time. I don't mean to say that autonomous technology could never work in principal. But we know that this SV in practice has too much hubris and too little oversight to deploy sensitive products responsibly, or with attention to any values above profit and growth.
  - ianbutler 3y ago
    That's what regulation is for, we have a good example in the FAA here, now we'll need something like the FAVA (Federal Autonomous Vehicle Administration) to design regulation for autonomous cars. We have a lot of precedent at this point on how to handle new ambiguous human advancements. Typically it goes, discovery, wild west, blood, regulation, standard part of society. Rinse and repeat.
Buttons840 3y ago
You say we need to investigate autonomous vehicle crashes, I agree. We haven't done this with people because there's not much to investigate; someone drinks, drives, and crashes, there's not much to gain from serious scientific investigation here. Autonomous vehicles are different and we would benefit from more focused scientific investigation of autonomous vehicle accidents.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  The idea that there's not much to investigate after an accident — that every accident is idiosyncratic — is one of the great lies of the auto industry (and their buddies, transportation planners).
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> We need to hold companies accountable for fixing flaws in autonomous vehicles. Don't we even just start getting a chance at doing that with autonomous vehicles? When a car crash happens and driver is found at fault, we can say "let's fix driver training to prevent this from happening again!" but humans are diverse, many don't pay attention in driver's ed, and they retain learnings at different rates, so this isn't going to work very well. With a self driving car, at least, since the software is replicated in many vehicles (while humans aren't), we have an actual chance improving on the situation over time.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

> > However, there are industries like aviation that take these issues seriously. They're investigated, reported, and learned from If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world would come to a screeching halt standstill. And besides they do it to protect the 200M plane not the passengers because those same passengers enter in the subway or a mall or a stadium or a train 15 mins after they disembark from the 200M plane, and they could bring (or face someone with) an assault rifle without facing any screening or x-rays or even an ID check I don’t like self driving cars but if the bar to plow ahead with deployment of a new tech is commercial aviation post 9/11 then we can call the end of technological improvement already.

woodruffw 3y ago
There's a lot of speculation here: aviation manages to be simultaneously extremely safe and a cornerstone of the global economy. It's unclear why other modes of transportation can't do the same; more precisely, it's unclear why private cars get put in the "acceptably dangerous" bucket when just about everything else is astoundingly safe (trains, planes, public & private buses, etc.). (Independently: the bigger reason the FAA and airlines take security seriously is because consumers demand that they do, not just because the planes themselves are expensive. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk.)
- IanCal 3y ago
  Cars are extremely safe. They're driven by barely trained humans which causes the problems. Give only a small fraction of people the ability to drive after significant training, and make driving their full time job, and you'll probably see crashes decline significantly.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  This is why I think we should never have brought in unleaded gasoline. Flying still uses leaded gasoline because regulations are written in blood. Pretty insane that we just let car manufacturers switch to this when a properly regulated transportation system would never consider such a high risk operation. It’s probably best we return to the tried, true, and most importantly safe system: leaded gasoline.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    This is clearly meant to be sarcasm, but I think you've got your facts wrong: commercial jet airplanes don't use leaded gasoline. They use Jet-A and similar formulations, which are essentially just kerosene[1] and contain no lead[2]. (I think you're thinking of avgas, which is used by piston-driven engines. These don't appear much in commercial aviation anymore.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel [2]: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-environment https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-enviro...
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      Regulated by the same organization for good reason. Personal aircraft to line up with personal cars.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > Aviation manages to be simultaneously extremely safe and a cornerstone of the global economy Because physics gives it such a huge advantage that it allows aviation to sit on its lead and waste some speed to pursue safety and still beat trains even where trains are very efficient and dense such as Europe. It remains to be seen what will happen now that Japan is about to enter a phase of quasi-jet speed type trains. The fact that every time you board on a plane you are treated like a criminal who is about to enter prision is unacceptable and would have never been unacceptable in the 1980s regardless of what would have happened terrorism-wise. Matter of fact the 80s were the peak era of terrorism > > consumers demand that they do....Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk Of course....and of course. A rational person's preoccupation should be reducing the chances to die from any cause, because once you are dead it's not that important what was the cause, doesn't it? It's very irrational to put heavy pressure on airlines and airports when 15 minutes after you exit from the terminal you enter in a mall and some neo-Nazi can absolutely blow up your brain with an assault rifle they bought without having to do not even an ID check, and I mean blow you up to the tune that your family members cannot even hold an open casket cerimony. > > it's unclear why private cars get put in the "acceptably dangerous" Because driving is a very powerful action, you turn the wheel right and the car goes right, turn left and it goes left, accelerate and it will speed up, break and it will come to a halt. It makes people feel very powerful and in control, people feel in control not only conceptually but in a limbic way, so they demand way less safety standards. Trains don't give that feeling because people aren't driving but people can at least wrap their minds around trains as vehicles, commercial passenger planes look so big and feel so gross and non suitable for flight that people are very suspicious of them. Nobody is afraid of cars, trains or ships, but fear of flight is one of the most common fears. Commercial passenger plaens after 9/11 forget about it you get to the aforementioned current day scenario where you are treated like a criminal every time you are boarding a plane
arcticbull 3y ago
> If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world would come to a screeching halt standstill. Trains are just about as safe as planes. Busses too. It's really just cars that are a major outlier. [1] [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
Veserv 3y ago
Not everything, just things that can kill hundreds to thousands of people if they go wrong. That is safety engineering 101; identify the important and critical parts and do those parts better and more carefully. You do not need to uniformly improve all elements to the same high standards as long as you can isolate them from the safety-critical path. This is a necessity because, as you point out, doing everything to the high standards is economically infeasible. But doing everything to economical standards is mass murder. No one standard works for the entire system, so you must isolate and apply the correct amount of effort for each component. This is a very weird concept for most software developers because most software is a big mushy ball of spaghetti where it is impossible to isolate or even identify the critical path. Luckily, those individuals largely do not develop safety-critical systems, so the lack of knowledge of basic safety processes does not hinder their deployments or result in a danger to public safety. What is problematic is when those people start doing safety critical systems. That is how you get the ideas being satirized by the article. Acting as if there is nothing in between total recklessness and impossibly perfect safety, so there is no choice but criminal recklessness. Basic industry-standard processes are, in fact, like 6 orders of magnitude safer during development and increase development velocity toward a safe, working product. Any viewpoint as insane as normalizing deaths during the development process is totally incompatible with successfully deploying a safety critical product. Deaths may be unavoidable due to the sheer weight of statistics, but deaths are always a failure of immense gravity. A flippant disregard for human life has no place on a safety critical product.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > Not everything, just things that can kill hundreds to thousands of people if they go wrong The original Al Quaeda plan for the WTC was to detonate explosives to tear it down, they tried in the 90s but of course they were so inept that they just made a huge mess in the parking lot. However let's say they succeded. Do you think we'd have checkpoints looking for explosives (or even components to make explosives) while entering Manhattan and all the 1000 odd major global cities which exceed 1M population? There is a thing with flight. Planes look so big and so gross and like they should not be able to fly and so people are scared of them, fear of flight is one of the most common fear. In the post 9/11 world add to that being under a plane, in the proximity of a plane or in a builing from which a plane can be seen. None of this stuff happens with trains and they too can kill thousands.
jakeinspace 3y ago
The commenter you're responding to is talking about aeronautical engineering safety practices (things like DO-178), not TSA-style security. If you haven't worked in the aerospace sector, it's hard to appreciate just how slow, methodical, and bureaucratic things are.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

~40k people die in the US from human caused car accidents every year (~12.9 deaths per 100,000 people, ~1.37 deaths per 100 million miles traveled), and we're getting squeamish about the robot that never gets tired, drunk, or inattentive? If you want to be free from cars, build walkable and carless cities people can afford and want to move to. We can then discuss sunsetting mass automobile infra (which is very unlikely, although infra spending can be weighted to more efficient urban development, mass transit, bicycle infra, etc vs automobile centric systems). Until then, the need for autonomous vehicles is an inconvenient truth. > This means we need an open, independent body outside of industry control, like the NTSB or NHTSA that can produce in depth, transparent, and publicly available reports that manufacturers can't bury or buy away. Strongly agree.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
> 40k people You're jumping to a quantitative comparison because that's simpler and more obvious, but the right way to think about it is qualitatively. We have over half a century of understanding of modern human driving patterns. We know the ceiling on the number of accidents/deaths that humans will cause. We know that if it changes, it will change slowly. AI works differently. An update to code or models wipes out all expectations we've learned from prior versions. In short, the entire fleet of autonomous vehicles can change behavior overnight with a software update and become murder tanks. Nothing will ever happen to all human drivers at once. Some small percentage will be drunk at any given time. We'll never all wake up with a new drunk version of ourselves at the same time. I don't mean to say that autonomous technology could never work in principal. But we know that this SV in practice has too much hubris and too little oversight to deploy sensitive products responsibly, or with attention to any values above profit and growth.
- ianbutler 3y ago
  That's what regulation is for, we have a good example in the FAA here, now we'll need something like the FAVA (Federal Autonomous Vehicle Administration) to design regulation for autonomous cars. We have a lot of precedent at this point on how to handle new ambiguous human advancements. Typically it goes, discovery, wild west, blood, regulation, standard part of society. Rinse and repeat.

Buttons840 3y ago

You say we need to investigate autonomous vehicle crashes, I agree. We haven't done this with people because there's not much to investigate; someone drinks, drives, and crashes, there's not much to gain from serious scientific investigation here. Autonomous vehicles are different and we would benefit from more focused scientific investigation of autonomous vehicle accidents.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
The idea that there's not much to investigate after an accident — that every accident is idiosyncratic — is one of the great lies of the auto industry (and their buddies, transportation planners).

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

> We need to hold companies accountable for fixing flaws in autonomous vehicles. Don't we even just start getting a chance at doing that with autonomous vehicles? When a car crash happens and driver is found at fault, we can say "let's fix driver training to prevent this from happening again!" but humans are diverse, many don't pay attention in driver's ed, and they retain learnings at different rates, so this isn't going to work very well. With a self driving car, at least, since the software is replicated in many vehicles (while humans aren't), we have an actual chance improving on the situation over time.