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What's the acceptable ratio of lives saved to lives lost? Because this will kill at least a few people who are desperately trying to get to a hospital or flee a

What's the acceptable ratio of lives saved to lives lost? Because this will kill at least a few people who are desperately trying to get to a hospital or flee a disaster zone.

anonymous_sorry 3y ago
Presumably 1:1 is the minimum acceptable. Whether the actual ratio is predictable or calculable is another matter.
- zoky 3y ago
  Would you accept 1:1 for the number of innocent persons imprisoned to the number of guilty persons who go free? In other words, for every fairly executed person we can have up to one wrongly executed person, and that's totally fine? If not, why is 1:1 even remotely acceptable for this?
  - kawhah 3y ago
    > for every fairly executed person we can have up to one wrongly executed person, and that's totally fine? you are confusing two ratios. the number of fairly executed people and the number of guilty people who are acquitted are obviously totally different.
    - zoky 3y ago
      But that's the standard, isn't it? Better 10 guilty men go free than one man wrongly imprisoned? And since we're talking about lives saved versus lives lost, it seems appropriate to apply the same metric. So how many people would have to be actually guilty of murder and fairly executed to justify wrongfully killing a single innocent human being? Personally, I'd say that number is really high, possibly infinite. I'm not inherently opposed to the death penalty, but I can't think of any fair number of actual murderers I'd be willing to execute if it meant the death of somebody who truly didn't deserve it.
      - caf 3y ago
        It's a different case, because one compares two very different harms: "guilty man goes free" vs "innocent man imprisoned", and the other compares two very similar harms: "person dies". The whole point of the "Better 10 guilty men go free..." aphorism is that the two harms are not equal, and that a guilty man going free is less than 10% of the harm of an innocent man imprisoned. The driving interlock case is just a straight up classic trolley problem.
        anonymous_sorry 3y ago
        I guess the argument is we shouldn't be endangering people who desperately need to be able to drive "erratically" for good reasons, in order to protect drunk-drivers from themselves. I suppose have some sympathy with that argument, which is why I said a minimum of 1:1 (a lower bound on the ratio). Drunk drivers kill innocent people as well of course.
  - mrmanner 3y ago
    We _do_ accept some false positives in the legal system, but the relevant comparison here is not fair vs wrong executions. The relevant comparison would be wrong executions vs lives potentially saved because of the fair executions that are only possible because we also accept the wrong executions. ...and even then, prison time or executions are not the same as vehicle rules.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
That's going to be a tiny percentage of the lives that are currently lost each day due to distracted and impaired drivers. Not that I think a kill-switch is a good idea as it's a technological solution to a law enforcement issue - that rarely works out well, especially when the tech is in the hands of the consumer. Unfortunately, there's a huge public bias towards driving and whenever there's discussion of limiters, people often come out with rare edge cases and ignore the very large numbers of problems that comes with unlimited vehicles. Personally, I think the problems are best solved with standard law enforcement procedures - a cop sees someone speeding, so they pull them over and get them fined.
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  What if instead of a kill switch, it's just a silent beacon to summon an officer to pull over the driver and investigate? Why are people okay with computers automatically judging gray area situations?
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    That sounds better to me. I still think it's a bad idea to have the tech in the possession of the driver as that means that persistent drunks would find a way to bypass it (e.g. cover it in metal foil).
    - rangestransform 3y ago
      My hardware is mine and it should especially never deliberately incriminate me. This is bad for the same reason that client side csam scanning is bad
  - masklinn 3y ago
    > What if instead of a kill switch, it's just a silent beacon to summon an officer to pull over the driver and investigate? Because the odds that the impaired or distracted driver has crashed before the officer is anywhere near (if they even respond to the call at all) are significant.
  - 3y ago
RamblingCTO 3y ago
Or are maybe going to be involved in a car crash due to the kill itself.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  I was on the interstate really late at night and a person's car had caught on fire. They had stopped in the middle of the road and ran out of the car. By the time I got there, at 70mph/110kmh, the fire had destroyed the electrical system, so there were no lights on the car. I swerved to avoid the car in the middle of the road and nearly rolled my car. I suspect these kill-switches will need to configure lights, etc. No matter what, you'll end up with a dead car in the middle of a road, potentially right around turns or on the edges of cliffs. I suspect this kill-switch would kill more people than the "suspected drunks" ever will.
  - shortcake27 3y ago
    It would be ridiculous if the car just shut down and stopped immediately. I really shouldn’t have to point out that it obviously doesn’t work this way. In-vehicle breathalysers have existed for decades. They way they work is they give you a warning that the vehicle will shut off in X amount of time. Eg 5 minutes. The car doesn’t just shut off without warning leaving you without boosted brakes or power steering mid-corner. With modern technology, most cars could also take over control from the driver when they deem safe to do so.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      If you are driving like your life depends on it, you just go "Why is my car beeping at me?" and either don't worry about it, or try and figure out what is flashing on the dash, if you can spare the attention, speaking from experience, while drifting in empty corn fields, the car was beeping at me about a flat tire... If your car just cuts off after beeping at you for something it has never beeped at you before for, you are likely to just continue straight on ... thus ending up exactly in the situation you say it won't work.
mrmanner 3y ago
Why should people have to drive desperately to the hospital in an age where intensive care ambulances and helicopters exist?
- iteria 3y ago
  Spoken like someone who doesn't live in a resource desert. My whole ass county didn't have a hospital until around 5 years ago. Depending on where you lived you had somewhere between a 20 and 60 drive to the hospital and it was just pure luck that we had other hospitals so close. We're only semi-rural. Other rural areas aren't so luck. I've lived in urban areas where it wws legitimately faster have someone take you to the hospital than try to get an ambulance to take you. Helicopters are also prohibitively expensive and often not even covered by insurance. People faint over a 1K ambulance ride, but you could be looking at 30K or more for a helicopter ride. Which is really more the point. Some people are poor. At least the hospital will work with you. I remember when I was poor and couldn't afford an ambulance ride but needed it, it was the only thing that couldn't be negotiated down and it was a huge financial burden on a collegr student. All I took away from that experience was that next time I was on the ground bleeding from a head wound, I should call a friend. Which I did later in an emergency that ended with me passed out in my car in a parking lot. My friend took me. As long as you can be severely financially hurt by taking ambulance people are gonna avoid them if you're not actively dying. And if you take away people's ability to drive people, they'll just not go. This is already happening with normal doctors and is one of the reasons hospitals are overburdened.
  - mrmanner 3y ago
    I totally agree that these things should be available and financially viable. Getting that in order should be the political conflict in one of the richest countries on earth. Allowing dangerous people on the road to avoid fixing emergency care is a terrible workaround :/
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  1. They may not be available where you live. 2. They may all be busy with other rescue ops. 3. (US-specific) You might wish you'd died after getting the medical bill for being helicoptered to ER.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

What's the acceptable ratio of lives saved to lives lost? Because this will kill at least a few people who are desperately trying to get to a hospital or flee a disaster zone.

anonymous_sorry 3y ago

Presumably 1:1 is the minimum acceptable. Whether the actual ratio is predictable or calculable is another matter.

zoky 3y ago
Would you accept 1:1 for the number of innocent persons imprisoned to the number of guilty persons who go free? In other words, for every fairly executed person we can have up to one wrongly executed person, and that's totally fine? If not, why is 1:1 even remotely acceptable for this?
- kawhah 3y ago
  > for every fairly executed person we can have up to one wrongly executed person, and that's totally fine? you are confusing two ratios. the number of fairly executed people and the number of guilty people who are acquitted are obviously totally different.
  - zoky 3y ago
    But that's the standard, isn't it? Better 10 guilty men go free than one man wrongly imprisoned? And since we're talking about lives saved versus lives lost, it seems appropriate to apply the same metric. So how many people would have to be actually guilty of murder and fairly executed to justify wrongfully killing a single innocent human being? Personally, I'd say that number is really high, possibly infinite. I'm not inherently opposed to the death penalty, but I can't think of any fair number of actual murderers I'd be willing to execute if it meant the death of somebody who truly didn't deserve it.
    - caf 3y ago
      It's a different case, because one compares two very different harms: "guilty man goes free" vs "innocent man imprisoned", and the other compares two very similar harms: "person dies". The whole point of the "Better 10 guilty men go free..." aphorism is that the two harms are not equal, and that a guilty man going free is less than 10% of the harm of an innocent man imprisoned. The driving interlock case is just a straight up classic trolley problem.
      - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
        I guess the argument is we shouldn't be endangering people who desperately need to be able to drive "erratically" for good reasons, in order to protect drunk-drivers from themselves. I suppose have some sympathy with that argument, which is why I said a minimum of 1:1 (a lower bound on the ratio). Drunk drivers kill innocent people as well of course.
- mrmanner 3y ago
  We _do_ accept some false positives in the legal system, but the relevant comparison here is not fair vs wrong executions. The relevant comparison would be wrong executions vs lives potentially saved because of the fair executions that are only possible because we also accept the wrong executions. ...and even then, prison time or executions are not the same as vehicle rules.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

That's going to be a tiny percentage of the lives that are currently lost each day due to distracted and impaired drivers. Not that I think a kill-switch is a good idea as it's a technological solution to a law enforcement issue - that rarely works out well, especially when the tech is in the hands of the consumer. Unfortunately, there's a huge public bias towards driving and whenever there's discussion of limiters, people often come out with rare edge cases and ignore the very large numbers of problems that comes with unlimited vehicles. Personally, I think the problems are best solved with standard law enforcement procedures - a cop sees someone speeding, so they pull them over and get them fined.

jasonjayr 3y ago
What if instead of a kill switch, it's just a silent beacon to summon an officer to pull over the driver and investigate? Why are people okay with computers automatically judging gray area situations?
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  That sounds better to me. I still think it's a bad idea to have the tech in the possession of the driver as that means that persistent drunks would find a way to bypass it (e.g. cover it in metal foil).
  - rangestransform 3y ago
    My hardware is mine and it should especially never deliberately incriminate me. This is bad for the same reason that client side csam scanning is bad
- masklinn 3y ago
  > What if instead of a kill switch, it's just a silent beacon to summon an officer to pull over the driver and investigate? Because the odds that the impaired or distracted driver has crashed before the officer is anywhere near (if they even respond to the call at all) are significant.
- 3y ago

RamblingCTO 3y ago

Or are maybe going to be involved in a car crash due to the kill itself.

withinboredom 3y ago
I was on the interstate really late at night and a person's car had caught on fire. They had stopped in the middle of the road and ran out of the car. By the time I got there, at 70mph/110kmh, the fire had destroyed the electrical system, so there were no lights on the car. I swerved to avoid the car in the middle of the road and nearly rolled my car. I suspect these kill-switches will need to configure lights, etc. No matter what, you'll end up with a dead car in the middle of a road, potentially right around turns or on the edges of cliffs. I suspect this kill-switch would kill more people than the "suspected drunks" ever will.
- shortcake27 3y ago
  It would be ridiculous if the car just shut down and stopped immediately. I really shouldn’t have to point out that it obviously doesn’t work this way. In-vehicle breathalysers have existed for decades. They way they work is they give you a warning that the vehicle will shut off in X amount of time. Eg 5 minutes. The car doesn’t just shut off without warning leaving you without boosted brakes or power steering mid-corner. With modern technology, most cars could also take over control from the driver when they deem safe to do so.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    If you are driving like your life depends on it, you just go "Why is my car beeping at me?" and either don't worry about it, or try and figure out what is flashing on the dash, if you can spare the attention, speaking from experience, while drifting in empty corn fields, the car was beeping at me about a flat tire... If your car just cuts off after beeping at you for something it has never beeped at you before for, you are likely to just continue straight on ... thus ending up exactly in the situation you say it won't work.

mrmanner 3y ago

Why should people have to drive desperately to the hospital in an age where intensive care ambulances and helicopters exist?

iteria 3y ago
Spoken like someone who doesn't live in a resource desert. My whole ass county didn't have a hospital until around 5 years ago. Depending on where you lived you had somewhere between a 20 and 60 drive to the hospital and it was just pure luck that we had other hospitals so close. We're only semi-rural. Other rural areas aren't so luck. I've lived in urban areas where it wws legitimately faster have someone take you to the hospital than try to get an ambulance to take you. Helicopters are also prohibitively expensive and often not even covered by insurance. People faint over a 1K ambulance ride, but you could be looking at 30K or more for a helicopter ride. Which is really more the point. Some people are poor. At least the hospital will work with you. I remember when I was poor and couldn't afford an ambulance ride but needed it, it was the only thing that couldn't be negotiated down and it was a huge financial burden on a collegr student. All I took away from that experience was that next time I was on the ground bleeding from a head wound, I should call a friend. Which I did later in an emergency that ended with me passed out in my car in a parking lot. My friend took me. As long as you can be severely financially hurt by taking ambulance people are gonna avoid them if you're not actively dying. And if you take away people's ability to drive people, they'll just not go. This is already happening with normal doctors and is one of the reasons hospitals are overburdened.
- mrmanner 3y ago
  I totally agree that these things should be available and financially viable. Getting that in order should be the political conflict in one of the richest countries on earth. Allowing dangerous people on the road to avoid fixing emergency care is a terrible workaround :/
TeMPOraL 3y ago
1. They may not be available where you live. 2. They may all be busy with other rescue ops. 3. (US-specific) You might wish you'd died after getting the medical bill for being helicoptered to ER.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]