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I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is higher than "safer than human drivers" -- like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist". Also, I feel like there's a lot of talking past one another in these conversations because one person will say "Let's see an autonomous truck shipping hazmat to Pittsburgh in February with freeway lanes shut down" and another person might say "that's a rare instance" but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions, with greater safety than the safest human driver. We tolerate human failures but to use them as the benchmark for autonomous systems would be perceived as unethical, because autonomous systems are deliberately designed and any failures by them would be seen as an intentional oversights and errors, and no one at Waymo or Tesla or where ever is ever going to be charged with vehicular manslaughter for an autonomous vehicle error. We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. My observations are only moderately related but I'm anticipating the same well-trod talking points coming up and want to address them.

creer 3y ago
Truck or cars are not strictly required to operate in all conditions in the current system: roads, entire freeways close when the conditions demand. Or demand that vehicles stop and put on chains. There is precedent.
- Edman274 3y ago
  I think that if you were reading my comment charitably you could infer that I meant "under all conditions where a car is legally allowed to operate." I don't think you actually believed that I was saying that a truck should have the capability to drive on the road when a roadway is not legal to drive on.
  - creer 3y ago
    You are seeing a fight that isn't there. There is precedent for either roads or vehicles for choosing not to handle some conditions. In a driving rain storm you will find rest areas stuffed full of trucks and cars that picked that time to nap. In San Francisco Waymo first served some hours and not others, some areas and not others - some of these choices apparently related to fog and wet pavement. In Oregon, you will find roads open, but white-out-ed. Etc, etc. Nobody forces human vehicles to keep moving and most of the ones with some sense make choices. Which are available also to automated vehicles. - Sure it should be expected of the vehicle to find a safer place to move itself than right in the middle of the lane, like I point out in another response here.
- foofie 3y ago
  > Truck or cars are not strictly required to operate in all conditions in the current system: roads, entire freeways close when the conditions demand. Or demand that vehicles stop and put on chains. There is precedent. I think you're confusing things. Weather changes midway anyone's drive, and all drivers are required to drive safely and reliably even during sudden extreme meteorological events. For a road to be closed, it takes an administrative action that reflects a decision that's largely arbitrary. Until a third party makes that decision, any driver is required to drive safely and reliability, regardless of the weather.
crazygringo 3y ago
> but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions Trucks are different because they're just for transportation of goods. As challenging weather arrives they can just wait at the nearest rest stop, pull over on the shoulder, etc. Your shipping will be delayed, but outside of that I don't think society will care. Totally acceptable as long as weather delays only last as long as a storm does. That's different from rideshare where people do expect to be able to call a Waymo even if it's snowing lightly.
- nativeit 3y ago
  Society is literally willing to let truck drivers die to maintain shipping times. See the responses during the height of COVID-19, or even just the demands placed on every day operators cross-referenced with their average health and mortality rates. Our treatment of truck drivers is already subhuman, I don’t think we’re likely to extend a lot of understanding to the robots.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    That's a bit of hyperbole. Lots of jobs take their toll on your health. That's nothing special about truck drivers, and it doesn't mean we "let them die". And you're ignoring the fact that not requiring a driver is significantly cheaper. And when it's speed versus cost, cost generally wins. So yes, society is absolutely going to be fine with trucks pausing in bad weather, because it means cheaper shipping. (And stuff that is urgent and requires next-day delivery is sent across the country by plane anyways, not by truck.)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - makeitdouble 3y ago
      On truckers dying on the job: you'd probably agree that there's arrangements that could save more truckers' lives but are not applied because of cost and lack of social pressure. For instance driver fatigue is said to be the primary cause of death among trucker, and that's obviously an issue we could throw money at to at least alleviate (but it wouldn't always be cheaper, that's the point) And to your point, yes, that same logic would aplly to a ton of high risk occupations. There's building construction techniques that cost more but have less risk, but we won't apply them where there's no pressure to do so. Are we letting them die then ? I don't see the hyperbole in saying yes, as a society we're not willing to put the money to reduce these deaths. I see it as a part of life, and don't think we'll change much even as autonomous vehicle come (if they kill 1 in 10000 people but cost way less than now, we'll swallow the pill collectively)
jdewerd 3y ago
So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.
- Edman274 3y ago
  I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our technological progress was such that the only calculator we could ever hope to produce would still have that kind of error 1 time in 1000, would it be unethical to prevent that from being sold? That's hard to say! One of the heuristics built into us (because we're mortal beings living beings in a competitive, historically resource-poor environment) is that we trust the devil we know more than the devil we don't, and so unless there's a strongly compelling reason to trust autonomous driving devices a lot more than humans, there will be some inertia against using them, even if the calculations are that it will save X number of lives. I mean, inherent in that calculation is a level of uncertainty and people don't necessarily trust that number, because they don't have a reason to trust it, because they haven't really seen enough to trust it. Why take a company's word for it that it's safer when they have a financial incentive to do some creative stuff to get their marketing pitch? I would say that if you feel it doesn't reflect well on us, it's because it hasn't been thought about enough.
  - jdewerd 3y ago
    A respectable track record and a margin for error are fine things to insist on, but that was not the argument being presented or objected to.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    I have a desk calculator with a worse error rate than that because of a button that sticks. I still use it
kevinchen 3y ago
I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable. That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms-comparable-human-benchmarks-over-7-million https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor... (Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)
- Edman274 3y ago
  Yeah, I should clarify that my response is in anticipation of the comment sections I often see on hackernews about self driving cars, rather than arguments from the self driving car companies themselves. Waymo won't say "we're slightly better than people, let us on your roadways" but I feel like every time I see something about self driving on Hackernews there's a handful of commenters taking the hyper-utilitarian viewpoint of "they're better than people, we all need to let the robots do driving for us" which will never convince anyone outside these comment sections.
  - tempest_ 3y ago
    Also isnt waymo only operating in Pheonix and California where the weather is always nice? What happens when it snows ?
    - NullHypothesist 3y ago
      They don't operate in snow now, but everybody was like "This is great, but it doesn't work in the rain!" this time last year. I've now taken many flawless rides in outright downpours in SF. It might take a year or two, but I have no doubt snow will be something that is a non-issue in the near future.
      - tomrod 3y ago
        Sensing tech has to improve to get through the noise. As far as I'm aware, you can't see a yellow line or white line on a highway if it's covered in dirty snow. We could also rework our roadways to include better sensing design and tech (passive or active!), but we are a ways out still from willingness to pay for that.
hinkley 3y ago
The bar for commercial driving should definitely be higher than for “civilian”. But I think the bar for civilian is also woefully out of date now. Giant trucks should require a commercial license. Make it easier to get than a delivery truck license, but weed out the soccer moms and bring back the station wagon. If you’re a professional tree trimmer, general contractor, or a forester, renewing your license is on the clock and not a big deal.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  This is a great idea and the first I've heard of it. Set a maximum weight of 5,000 lbs for an ordinary license. Minivans will come in just under the line. Small SUVs like the CRV or RAV4 will be allowed, as will small trucks like the Ford Maverick. Indeed, most of those vehicles are under 4,000 lbs. Even some larger SUVs like the Honda Pilot or (just barely) the Toyota 4runner get under the bar. Even a low-specced F-150. But nothing bigger than that. Truth is, I'd prefer the bar at 4,000 lbs, which would limit us to Camrys and CRVs, but 5,000 would really allow just about any reasonable vehicle. And big heavy EVs with massive acceleration are just too powerful for somebody who's got a Starbucks in one hand, a cell phone in the other, their knee on the wheel, and shouting kids in the back seat. "Pedal misapplication" will go tragic really fast. 5,000 lb limit. Sincerely, A Pedestrian
  - davchana 3y ago
    It would also help to make it expensive to maintain/own vehicles over certain wait. California charges weight fees, but only for pickups, no car or SUV gets that weight fees.
  - c0nfused 3y ago
    I actually think we should also include a hood height limit. I would be for a CDL for any vehicle that is tall enough that an aver age pedestrian standing on the street cannot see over the hood. I'm over 6 feet tall and I regularly have trouble doing this as a pedestrian in the USA. I can only imagine how it is to be smaller.
    - 3y ago
foofie 3y ago
> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. I'll add that one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term. Until a Tesla/Uber/Waymo exec responsible for autonomous driving can serve a prison term for accidents caused by their service, the penalty for accidents caused by autonomous driving is orders of magnitude lighter than those applied to human drivers.
- amelius 3y ago
  We should also demand that these companies are run by engineers, not MBA types. Otherwise, we'd end up with neglect of safety measures as seen at Boeing. And I'm not sure if any kind of external incentive could change that.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term. Really? How does anyone get that. I've only seen murder with a car worth 90 days in jail and loss of the car.
  - foofie 3y ago
    > Really? How does anyone get that. In the US, vehicular homicide comes with a sentence that's typically between 9 and 30 years.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist" Half the taxi and Uber drivers in New York are perpetually on a phone call, and frequently interacting with their phones.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I'll take your word for it (not being an American and only having visited NYC once), but even then most of the rules of the road are… not perfectly enforced. I suspect if the rules were perfectly enforced, the only humans allowed to drive would be those who actually don't. I suspect — no, I hope — that anyone who admits in advance that they intend to break the rules, won't get a license.
  - tempest_ 3y ago
    I mean just look at how popular automated enforcement like speed and red light cameras.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      Not sure which side you're arguing. Does the US even have automated speed traps? Every time I hear about them, there's opposition and it doesn't happen. I think the most recent one I heard about in the US, the plan was to issue a ticket unless the speed is at least 11mph over the limit, which seems... both fine but also kinda silly? Red light cameras were even a big fight to get implemented back when they were a new idea, though they're relatively uncontroversial these days. To me, the difference is that the speed limit is intentionally poorly enforced, because law enforcement knows that speed limits in many places are set inconsistently and at unreasonable levels (and I believe that's also intentional; I recall reading that limits in many places are set at the 85% percentile of actual measured traffic speed, or something like that). An automated speed trap can't judge whether a particular speed is safe for the current weather and traffic conditions. On the other hand, it's never safe to run a red light; that's just a binary "you did it"/"you didn't do it". Yes, I know, technically it is safe to run a red light when visibility is plentiful and there's no cross-traffic within sight, but I think we as a society have accepted the idea that you just shouldn't run red lights, and getting ticketed for doing so is fine under nearly any circumstances.
fallingknife 3y ago
The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.
- jampekka 3y ago
  We have a lot safer transportation systems than private cars but don't deploy them. Is this basically killing people too? Driving is murder?
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Yes. There are a lot of people who are driving for things that a good public transit system could handle. Sure you can have your SUV for towing the boat to the lake - but you only do that on weekends (and no every weekend) - why are you driving to work, to church, get groceries - for most people those are tasks that that a good transit system could handle. Note that by good transit system I mean one where you never check the schedule because the next bus/train is never more than 5 minutes (that is a maximum time). By good transit I also mean a system of transfers to express service so you can get to more distance places quickly. Nobody in the US has a good system (NYC's subways don't even come that often!), but there is no reason we can't have that, and some places in the world do have it (at least for a few).
    - lotsoweiners 3y ago
      Yeah I’d totally take transit so long as it will pick me up in my driveway, is ready within a minute of me deciding I need to leave, and is a ride for only me and my family/friends.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        This attitude is why we can't have nice things. You have probably never experienced a system like I outlined and you won't even consider it without adding other requirements that drive up the cost until we cannot get it. If instead you would accept that you can wait up to five minutes, and "other people" are nice enough and so you can share a space with them - we could have a nice transit system. The five minute time I used above is not arbitrary. While there is some debate on the exact number, 5 minutes allows for a lot operational things that are really nice.
maxerickson 3y ago
Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal. If an autonomous system can get a CDL, it's probably gonna be more effective at continuously meeting that standard than a lot of the humans that do the same thing (but are distracted on a given day or have started using substances, or didn't sleep well or whatever).
- Edman274 3y ago
  > Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal. That is not sufficient for self-driving vehicles. The license is the thing that shows "okay, this person seems safe" but then some of the things that keep them safe are the threat of accidentally killing themselves, or being arrested and put in jail for a crime they commit while driving, or the financial penalty of being sued for an injury / damage they cause, or the risk of having their license taken away for errors. If a human being applying for their license was invincible, incapable of being jailed, sued, or having their license taken away, you might expect that our CDL or other licensing processes would be more stringent.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    Wait, why do you think that permission to operate the autonomous vehicles would not be withdrawn? It's happened! It's totally bizarre to give mediocre humans credit for their self preservation and then demand that an autonomous system be beyond superb because it doesn't have it. Statistically, the mediocrity is going to be the bigger problem.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Maybe, but our driving tests are designed around assessing humans. A system that fundamentally works quite differently likely has very different performance characteristics and failure modes and may need to be assessed differently to demonstrate that it will probably perform adequately in non-test conditions.
ben_w 3y ago
I agree, though I either don't see (or I see and misperceive) many examples of people mistaking the utilitarian result for the politically acceptable one.
jayd16 3y ago
> like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist". But we do allow it. Sure its illegal but we don't put in the effort to actually prevent it. Just because we don't like it and would want it to be better doesn't mean we aren't allowing it.
weaksauce 3y ago
trucking autonomous driving needs to be parity or better than the average truck driver not the average driver.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Sebb767 3y ago
> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. As we have seen with the titan sub, not even death is a full deterrent. A lot of companies will still risk it for the biscuit and take the risk of getting jailed for their shot at leading the market (in fact, a lot of people risk actual jailtime for financial gain). Having strict regulation and not allowing subpar cars on the street really is the only way.

creer 3y ago

Truck or cars are not strictly required to operate in all conditions in the current system: roads, entire freeways close when the conditions demand. Or demand that vehicles stop and put on chains. There is precedent.

Edman274 3y ago
I think that if you were reading my comment charitably you could infer that I meant "under all conditions where a car is legally allowed to operate." I don't think you actually believed that I was saying that a truck should have the capability to drive on the road when a roadway is not legal to drive on.
- creer 3y ago
  You are seeing a fight that isn't there. There is precedent for either roads or vehicles for choosing not to handle some conditions. In a driving rain storm you will find rest areas stuffed full of trucks and cars that picked that time to nap. In San Francisco Waymo first served some hours and not others, some areas and not others - some of these choices apparently related to fog and wet pavement. In Oregon, you will find roads open, but white-out-ed. Etc, etc. Nobody forces human vehicles to keep moving and most of the ones with some sense make choices. Which are available also to automated vehicles. - Sure it should be expected of the vehicle to find a safer place to move itself than right in the middle of the lane, like I point out in another response here.
foofie 3y ago
> Truck or cars are not strictly required to operate in all conditions in the current system: roads, entire freeways close when the conditions demand. Or demand that vehicles stop and put on chains. There is precedent. I think you're confusing things. Weather changes midway anyone's drive, and all drivers are required to drive safely and reliably even during sudden extreme meteorological events. For a road to be closed, it takes an administrative action that reflects a decision that's largely arbitrary. Until a third party makes that decision, any driver is required to drive safely and reliability, regardless of the weather.

crazygringo 3y ago

> but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions Trucks are different because they're just for transportation of goods. As challenging weather arrives they can just wait at the nearest rest stop, pull over on the shoulder, etc. Your shipping will be delayed, but outside of that I don't think society will care. Totally acceptable as long as weather delays only last as long as a storm does. That's different from rideshare where people do expect to be able to call a Waymo even if it's snowing lightly.

nativeit 3y ago
Society is literally willing to let truck drivers die to maintain shipping times. See the responses during the height of COVID-19, or even just the demands placed on every day operators cross-referenced with their average health and mortality rates. Our treatment of truck drivers is already subhuman, I don’t think we’re likely to extend a lot of understanding to the robots.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  That's a bit of hyperbole. Lots of jobs take their toll on your health. That's nothing special about truck drivers, and it doesn't mean we "let them die". And you're ignoring the fact that not requiring a driver is significantly cheaper. And when it's speed versus cost, cost generally wins. So yes, society is absolutely going to be fine with trucks pausing in bad weather, because it means cheaper shipping. (And stuff that is urgent and requires next-day delivery is sent across the country by plane anyways, not by truck.)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    On truckers dying on the job: you'd probably agree that there's arrangements that could save more truckers' lives but are not applied because of cost and lack of social pressure. For instance driver fatigue is said to be the primary cause of death among trucker, and that's obviously an issue we could throw money at to at least alleviate (but it wouldn't always be cheaper, that's the point) And to your point, yes, that same logic would aplly to a ton of high risk occupations. There's building construction techniques that cost more but have less risk, but we won't apply them where there's no pressure to do so. Are we letting them die then ? I don't see the hyperbole in saying yes, as a society we're not willing to put the money to reduce these deaths. I see it as a part of life, and don't think we'll change much even as autonomous vehicle come (if they kill 1 in 10000 people but cost way less than now, we'll swallow the pill collectively)

jdewerd 3y ago

So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.

Edman274 3y ago
I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our technological progress was such that the only calculator we could ever hope to produce would still have that kind of error 1 time in 1000, would it be unethical to prevent that from being sold? That's hard to say! One of the heuristics built into us (because we're mortal beings living beings in a competitive, historically resource-poor environment) is that we trust the devil we know more than the devil we don't, and so unless there's a strongly compelling reason to trust autonomous driving devices a lot more than humans, there will be some inertia against using them, even if the calculations are that it will save X number of lives. I mean, inherent in that calculation is a level of uncertainty and people don't necessarily trust that number, because they don't have a reason to trust it, because they haven't really seen enough to trust it. Why take a company's word for it that it's safer when they have a financial incentive to do some creative stuff to get their marketing pitch? I would say that if you feel it doesn't reflect well on us, it's because it hasn't been thought about enough.
- jdewerd 3y ago
  A respectable track record and a margin for error are fine things to insist on, but that was not the argument being presented or objected to.
- kortilla 3y ago
  I have a desk calculator with a worse error rate than that because of a button that sticks. I still use it

kevinchen 3y ago

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable. That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms-comparable-human-benchmarks-over-7-million https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor... (Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)

Edman274 3y ago
Yeah, I should clarify that my response is in anticipation of the comment sections I often see on hackernews about self driving cars, rather than arguments from the self driving car companies themselves. Waymo won't say "we're slightly better than people, let us on your roadways" but I feel like every time I see something about self driving on Hackernews there's a handful of commenters taking the hyper-utilitarian viewpoint of "they're better than people, we all need to let the robots do driving for us" which will never convince anyone outside these comment sections.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  Also isnt waymo only operating in Pheonix and California where the weather is always nice? What happens when it snows ?
  - NullHypothesist 3y ago
    They don't operate in snow now, but everybody was like "This is great, but it doesn't work in the rain!" this time last year. I've now taken many flawless rides in outright downpours in SF. It might take a year or two, but I have no doubt snow will be something that is a non-issue in the near future.
    - tomrod 3y ago
      Sensing tech has to improve to get through the noise. As far as I'm aware, you can't see a yellow line or white line on a highway if it's covered in dirty snow. We could also rework our roadways to include better sensing design and tech (passive or active!), but we are a ways out still from willingness to pay for that.

hinkley 3y ago

The bar for commercial driving should definitely be higher than for “civilian”. But I think the bar for civilian is also woefully out of date now. Giant trucks should require a commercial license. Make it easier to get than a delivery truck license, but weed out the soccer moms and bring back the station wagon. If you’re a professional tree trimmer, general contractor, or a forester, renewing your license is on the clock and not a big deal.

FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
This is a great idea and the first I've heard of it. Set a maximum weight of 5,000 lbs for an ordinary license. Minivans will come in just under the line. Small SUVs like the CRV or RAV4 will be allowed, as will small trucks like the Ford Maverick. Indeed, most of those vehicles are under 4,000 lbs. Even some larger SUVs like the Honda Pilot or (just barely) the Toyota 4runner get under the bar. Even a low-specced F-150. But nothing bigger than that. Truth is, I'd prefer the bar at 4,000 lbs, which would limit us to Camrys and CRVs, but 5,000 would really allow just about any reasonable vehicle. And big heavy EVs with massive acceleration are just too powerful for somebody who's got a Starbucks in one hand, a cell phone in the other, their knee on the wheel, and shouting kids in the back seat. "Pedal misapplication" will go tragic really fast. 5,000 lb limit. Sincerely, A Pedestrian
- davchana 3y ago
  It would also help to make it expensive to maintain/own vehicles over certain wait. California charges weight fees, but only for pickups, no car or SUV gets that weight fees.
- c0nfused 3y ago
  I actually think we should also include a hood height limit. I would be for a CDL for any vehicle that is tall enough that an aver age pedestrian standing on the street cannot see over the hood. I'm over 6 feet tall and I regularly have trouble doing this as a pedestrian in the USA. I can only imagine how it is to be smaller.
  - 3y ago

foofie 3y ago

> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. I'll add that one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term. Until a Tesla/Uber/Waymo exec responsible for autonomous driving can serve a prison term for accidents caused by their service, the penalty for accidents caused by autonomous driving is orders of magnitude lighter than those applied to human drivers.

amelius 3y ago
We should also demand that these companies are run by engineers, not MBA types. Otherwise, we'd end up with neglect of safety measures as seen at Boeing. And I'm not sure if any kind of external incentive could change that.
bluGill 3y ago
> one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term. Really? How does anyone get that. I've only seen murder with a car worth 90 days in jail and loss of the car.
- foofie 3y ago
  > Really? How does anyone get that. In the US, vehicular homicide comes with a sentence that's typically between 9 and 30 years.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist" Half the taxi and Uber drivers in New York are perpetually on a phone call, and frequently interacting with their phones.

ben_w 3y ago
I'll take your word for it (not being an American and only having visited NYC once), but even then most of the rules of the road are… not perfectly enforced. I suspect if the rules were perfectly enforced, the only humans allowed to drive would be those who actually don't. I suspect — no, I hope — that anyone who admits in advance that they intend to break the rules, won't get a license.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  I mean just look at how popular automated enforcement like speed and red light cameras.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Not sure which side you're arguing. Does the US even have automated speed traps? Every time I hear about them, there's opposition and it doesn't happen. I think the most recent one I heard about in the US, the plan was to issue a ticket unless the speed is at least 11mph over the limit, which seems... both fine but also kinda silly? Red light cameras were even a big fight to get implemented back when they were a new idea, though they're relatively uncontroversial these days. To me, the difference is that the speed limit is intentionally poorly enforced, because law enforcement knows that speed limits in many places are set inconsistently and at unreasonable levels (and I believe that's also intentional; I recall reading that limits in many places are set at the 85% percentile of actual measured traffic speed, or something like that). An automated speed trap can't judge whether a particular speed is safe for the current weather and traffic conditions. On the other hand, it's never safe to run a red light; that's just a binary "you did it"/"you didn't do it". Yes, I know, technically it is safe to run a red light when visibility is plentiful and there's no cross-traffic within sight, but I think we as a society have accepted the idea that you just shouldn't run red lights, and getting ticketed for doing so is fine under nearly any circumstances.

fallingknife 3y ago

The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.

jampekka 3y ago
We have a lot safer transportation systems than private cars but don't deploy them. Is this basically killing people too? Driving is murder?
- bluGill 3y ago
  Yes. There are a lot of people who are driving for things that a good public transit system could handle. Sure you can have your SUV for towing the boat to the lake - but you only do that on weekends (and no every weekend) - why are you driving to work, to church, get groceries - for most people those are tasks that that a good transit system could handle. Note that by good transit system I mean one where you never check the schedule because the next bus/train is never more than 5 minutes (that is a maximum time). By good transit I also mean a system of transfers to express service so you can get to more distance places quickly. Nobody in the US has a good system (NYC's subways don't even come that often!), but there is no reason we can't have that, and some places in the world do have it (at least for a few).
  - lotsoweiners 3y ago
    Yeah I’d totally take transit so long as it will pick me up in my driveway, is ready within a minute of me deciding I need to leave, and is a ride for only me and my family/friends.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      This attitude is why we can't have nice things. You have probably never experienced a system like I outlined and you won't even consider it without adding other requirements that drive up the cost until we cannot get it. If instead you would accept that you can wait up to five minutes, and "other people" are nice enough and so you can share a space with them - we could have a nice transit system. The five minute time I used above is not arbitrary. While there is some debate on the exact number, 5 minutes allows for a lot operational things that are really nice.

maxerickson 3y ago

Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal. If an autonomous system can get a CDL, it's probably gonna be more effective at continuously meeting that standard than a lot of the humans that do the same thing (but are distracted on a given day or have started using substances, or didn't sleep well or whatever).

Edman274 3y ago
> Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal. That is not sufficient for self-driving vehicles. The license is the thing that shows "okay, this person seems safe" but then some of the things that keep them safe are the threat of accidentally killing themselves, or being arrested and put in jail for a crime they commit while driving, or the financial penalty of being sued for an injury / damage they cause, or the risk of having their license taken away for errors. If a human being applying for their license was invincible, incapable of being jailed, sued, or having their license taken away, you might expect that our CDL or other licensing processes would be more stringent.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  Wait, why do you think that permission to operate the autonomous vehicles would not be withdrawn? It's happened! It's totally bizarre to give mediocre humans credit for their self preservation and then demand that an autonomous system be beyond superb because it doesn't have it. Statistically, the mediocrity is going to be the bigger problem.
thfuran 3y ago
Maybe, but our driving tests are designed around assessing humans. A system that fundamentally works quite differently likely has very different performance characteristics and failure modes and may need to be assessed differently to demonstrate that it will probably perform adequately in non-test conditions.

ben_w 3y ago

I agree, though I either don't see (or I see and misperceive) many examples of people mistaking the utilitarian result for the politically acceptable one.

jayd16 3y ago

> like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist". But we do allow it. Sure its illegal but we don't put in the effort to actually prevent it. Just because we don't like it and would want it to be better doesn't mean we aren't allowing it.

weaksauce 3y ago

trucking autonomous driving needs to be parity or better than the average truck driver not the average driver.

deleted 3y ago

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Sebb767 3y ago

> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. As we have seen with the titan sub, not even death is a full deterrent. A lot of companies will still risk it for the biscuit and take the risk of getting jailed for their shot at leading the market (in fact, a lot of people risk actual jailtime for financial gain). Having strict regulation and not allowing subpar cars on the street really is the only way.