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> I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a

by dkarl 3y ago

> I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a degree that people just don't comprehend. Human would be terrible drivers even if you ignored the fact that many of them are chemically impaired, even if you ignored the fact that they are prone to rage and aggression. As we consider the safety of self-driving vehicles, there is going to be a disorienting amount of cognitive dissonance as we are forced to confront the awfulness of what we already accepted and have been living with for a century. There were over 42,000 deaths due to motor vehicle accidents in 2022. That means if we created self-driving cars that were twice as safe as humans, they might save 21,000 lives per year and also kill 21,000 people per year. That sounds insane, but it would be a sane way of improving an insane situation. Kibitzing about these individual incidents is a normal and inevitable human way to try to deal with the problem, but we need some way of measuring how deadly self-driving cars are in comparison to how deadly human drivers are. I never see that, so I wonder how we're going to know when we should loosen the reins on them? Are regulators actually doing their jobs, or are they just going to move inexorably forward while occasionally throwing bones to public outrage? The stakes here are huge, tens of thousands of deaths and horrific injuries per year, and we will unnecessarily kill lots of people if we deploy self-driving technology too fast or too slowly. The way this will probably work out in practice is regulators choosing the path of least resistance between uninformed public outrage and greed-driven industry pressure. What we should be asking for is a data-driven approach.

dilyevsky 3y ago
“We” have done nothing of this sort. SF is its own trashfire and they just gave up on enforcing any traffic violations except parking which brings revenue. You can look this up in their own stats for this year
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
The problem is that you can't punish a car. If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them. There was a case where a woman was drunk driving and hit a man, he came up over the hood and into her windshield. He was alive but bleeding. She drove home and parked her car in the garage. He bled out through the night. NO ONE was sympathetic towards that woman. But if an automated vehicle does it, it just becomes a line item that someone somewhere has to pay. You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability. What we should be doing is making it an existential crisis for these companies. That will never happen and thus self driving vehicles will become good enough and that's it.
- dbwastedspace 3y ago
  [dead]
- oatmeal1 3y ago
  > The problem is that you can't punish a car. You can punish the manufacturer of any item that creates an excessive danger to the public. Lawn darts aren't intended to be thrown near people, and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently. Human-driven cars are used negligently and kill 40,000 Americans a year.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    > and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently Lawn darts don't exist because the FDA banned them. Without that happening, they'd still be sold today. > Kids can hurt themselves with bicycles and archery and rifles, too. Why aren’t they included? I’d rather be hit by a lawn dart than by a horseshoe -- R. B. Jarts, inventor of lawn darts.
- cogman10 3y ago
  This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the company" is absurdly high. Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any sort of jail time in association with the deaths (and, after it was banned, they started selling the dalkon shield in poorer regions). A serial killer killing 10 people gets the death penalty, yet there exist mining companies that have easily killed 1000s of employees with silicosis (and are still operating today, looking at you Dow [2]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you. But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.

by dkarl 3y ago

dilyevsky 3y ago

“We” have done nothing of this sort. SF is its own trashfire and they just gave up on enforcing any traffic violations except parking which brings revenue. You can look this up in their own stats for this year

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

The problem is that you can't punish a car. If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them. There was a case where a woman was drunk driving and hit a man, he came up over the hood and into her windshield. He was alive but bleeding. She drove home and parked her car in the garage. He bled out through the night. NO ONE was sympathetic towards that woman. But if an automated vehicle does it, it just becomes a line item that someone somewhere has to pay. You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability. What we should be doing is making it an existential crisis for these companies. That will never happen and thus self driving vehicles will become good enough and that's it.

dbwastedspace 3y ago
[dead]
oatmeal1 3y ago
> The problem is that you can't punish a car. You can punish the manufacturer of any item that creates an excessive danger to the public. Lawn darts aren't intended to be thrown near people, and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently. Human-driven cars are used negligently and kill 40,000 Americans a year.
- cogman10 3y ago
  > and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently Lawn darts don't exist because the FDA banned them. Without that happening, they'd still be sold today. > Kids can hurt themselves with bicycles and archery and rifles, too. Why aren’t they included? I’d rather be hit by a lawn dart than by a horseshoe -- R. B. Jarts, inventor of lawn darts.
cogman10 3y ago
This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the company" is absurdly high. Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any sort of jail time in association with the deaths (and, after it was banned, they started selling the dalkon shield in poorer regions). A serial killer killing 10 people gets the death penalty, yet there exist mining companies that have easily killed 1000s of employees with silicosis (and are still operating today, looking at you Dow [2]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you. But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.