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Thare's a, probably not very obvious, situation when human could have no such accident in the same scenario. At all. Preventing an accident does not leave any t

• CityOfThrowaway 3y ago
  We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans. Over long mileage, the rate of prevented accidents shows up in the data as a lower overall accident rate. I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat. Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's not really the right way to think about it anyways.
  • talldatethrow 3y ago
    IMO these are a slightly fake stat. You're comparing to overall stats, that include the drunk, the high, the sleep deprived, and the crazy wild aggressive wreckless. If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous. You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't be counted the same.
    • resolutebat 3y ago
      You're making a classic is-ought fallacy here. Drunk, high, sleep deprived or "crazy wild aggressive reckless" human drivers ought not to exist, but they do, and thus it's absolutely fair to compared autonomous drivers against them.
      • eurleif 3y ago
        If GP's mother switches from driving for herself to having Waymo drive for her, her risk of injury will increase. Therefore, if her goal is to avoid injury, it would be counterproductive for her to make that switch. That conclusion does not require any is-ought fallacy.
        • hot_gril 3y ago
          Exactly. I know that my odds are different from the average.
          • resolutebat 3y ago
            So are you one of the 88% who know they are better than average, or one of the 12% who are worse? https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-drivers-really-think-they-are-above-aver/ https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver...
            • eurleif 3y ago
              >Obviously, not everyone can be above average. Exactly half of all drivers have to be in the bottom half when it comes to driving skills and safety. This page is confused about the difference between mean and median. The 88% of drivers who think they are above average are not necessarily correct, but there would be nothing logically inconsistent about them being correct.
              • deleted 3y ago
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            • dns_snek 3y ago
              This has nothing to do with being "a better driver" than average. If you simply don't drive while intoxicated, extremely tired, or distracted with your gadgets, you're already beating the average when it comes to collisions and injuries.
    • shadowgovt 3y ago
      Unfortunately, we can't replicate your mother and put her behind the wheel of every vehicle in America. But we can crank out thousands of autonomous vehicles with thousands of identical copies of highly tuned safety algorithms.
      • talldatethrow 3y ago
        If you had a new born to take home from the hospital and were 20 miles from home.. would you take an autonomous car or have you or a family member drive you home?
        • fragmede 3y ago
          With emotions running high surrounding this newborn, me, or a family member, is likely to be stressed, under-slept, possibly drinking. Why wouldn't I want this hypothetical autonomous car to take us all home safely?
          • talldatethrow 3y ago
            Because the math shows that currently it drives about as bad as a sometimes high, drunk, sleepy, angry person. If you had a family member that cared about you available to drive, they would be much safer than the typical ai car right now.
            • concordDance 3y ago
              > Because the math shows that currently it drives about as bad as a sometimes high, drunk, sleepy, angry person. This is surprising. Got a cite for that?
        • resolutebat 3y ago
          The closest I've come to killing another human was when I was driving to the hospital at night to pick up my wife & newborn, sleep-deprived and high on adrenaline, and came this >< close to taking out a cyclist I completely failed to see.
    • darkwater 3y ago
      But one of the points of self-driving cars is to remove those bad drivers from the driving seat.
      • littlestymaar 3y ago
        Maybe in theory, but then you have a bigger social/psychological/economic problem because these populations are necessarily the ones that are going to be compatible with the business model for autonomous cars. And if you get a bigger proportion of “good drivers” in autonomous cars than there is in the overall population, you're on fact increasing the overall number of accidents.
        • darkwater 3y ago
          I agree that a very probable outcome is that the real bad drivers will, for one reason or another, keep using non-self-driving cars way longer than good drivers. But also a good self-driving car should have faster reflexes than a good human driver, so it might mitigate anyway the damage done by a drunken driver.
      • kaba0 3y ago
        How? There will be multiple decades of self-driving — human driver co-existence. I’m not convinced that this phase would be safer than the human-only one, as AI might very well handle bad human drivers much worse (as it is an edge case).
      • xorcist 3y ago
        I have never once heard self-driving cars sold with the argument "they're great for sleep deprived and alcoholics". Maybe they should be.
        • willvarfar 3y ago
          I have always wanted a self-driving car so there's no more "designated driver" hassle with going out.
    • godelski 3y ago
      You're in the write direction but I think you don't have the right words to describe what you're trying to describe. I made a sister comment, but if I correctly understand you, then it would be more accurate to say that the averaged statistic removes important variables for making accurate conclusions. We need not look at your mother, but we can consider different environments. I think most of us would say it would be silly to compare accidents on the highway to accidents to those in an urban street, but an "average by mile" is doing precisely this. We'd call this "marginalization" and it is why you should be suspicious when anyone discusses averages (or medians!). (On that note, the median and average are always within one standard deviation of another. It's useful because if you have both and they are far apart you know there's a lot of variance). I hope I accurately understood you and can help make a clearer message.
      • littlestymaar 3y ago
        > why you should be suspicious when anyone discusses averages I like to say that the average human being has one testicle and half a vagina, which is not very representative of anyone around. > On that note, the median and average are always within one standard deviation of another Oh really? That's cool.
        • godelski 3y ago
          Haha yeah that is accurate. The right language is situational though haha. People are generally overconfident in their ability to mathematically describe things. There's a clique "all models are wrong" and like all cliques it is something everyone can repeat but not internalize lol
          • agos 3y ago
            you should not forget the second part: all models are wrong, some are useful
            • littlestymaar 3y ago
              Yes, but unfortunately the second part is usually employed by people who want to put under the rug the fact that their model is dubious. All models are wrong, only some of them are useful, and only when handled with care.
    • cm2187 3y ago
      But your mother is still better off with the drunks not driving (they may crash into her car). So she may still have less accidents in a world where everyone goes self driving. This will still leave us with the random and dangerous behaviours of cyclists and motorcycles though.
  • cycomanic 3y ago
    The problem will all of these stats (although some like Waymo are better than others like Tesla), is that the bare number is quite misleading because they compare apples to oranges. Firstly Waymo (and others don't often don't operate in places that they have excluded or they don't know. Humans drive in unfamiliar places (which I'd bet changes the chances of accidents). Moreover, waymo might decide to not operate in some places at all because they deem the traffic/road conditions to dangerous (and I think that's a good thing), however human accidents in those areas (which are by the condition are more accident prone) still go into those statistics. It's similar for weather, self driving cars might refuse to operate in some weather conditions (I don't think it's by accident that most companies mainly operate in the relatively warm and sunny places of the US), human accidents under bad conditions are still part of the statistics. And again drunk/impaired drivers also go into the statistics, if we disregard them and humans become safer, than this is not an argument that self driving is safer than humans, but an argument that there isn't enough enforcement around riving impaired.
  • godelski 3y ago
    > We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans. This is extremely limited and really not relevant to the topic at hand. You've marginalized out the type of accidents. Most miles driven are on highways and this is a different environment than urban. The information you've marginalized out is essential for making reasonable conclusions about safety. It isn't important to just know the ratio of TP/TN/FP/FN but more specifically where and when these errors happen. The nuance is critical to this type of discussion and a simplification can actually cause you to make poor decisions that are in the wrong direction rather than naive decisions but in the correct direction.
    • resolutebat 3y ago
      I can guarantee you there are more accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven in dense urban areas, and that's where Waymo has been driving as well. Last I checked they're not even operating on freeways.
    • disillusioned 3y ago
      I highly recommend reading through Waymo's own publications that addresses these exact concerns: https://waymo.com/safety/ https://waymo.com/safety/ Specifically "Framework for a conflict typology including causal factors for use in ADS safety evaluation" and "Comparison of Waymo Rider-Only Crash Data to Human Benchmarks at 7.1 Million Miles" It may not surprise you to know that they have given a LOT of consideration to these factors and have built a complex model that addresses these to demonstrate their claims.
  • xorcist 3y ago
    That's terrible statistics. Let children drive and the self-driving cars would be, on average, even more safe! Comparisons should be made 1) with the median, not the average, and 2) under the same conditions.
  • belorn 3y ago
    If we are going to use flawed statistics of autonomous cars vs humans, we should first look at even better examples then waymo. Im pretty sure Mercedes Level 3 driving automation for the Autobahn is safer, as well as autonomous cars that park cars at airports. Their accidents per 1,000,000 miles should be 0, a statistic which is hard for humans to beat. The more restricted and environment controlled we can make it, the few accidents we see machine controlled cars do, and the worse a adaptive human driver does in comparison (barring extreme situations).
• bluecalm 3y ago
  On the other hand there are many human drivers who will endanger cyclists on purpose because they either don't like them or are inconsiderable aaaholes in general and engage in dangerous behaviours like speeding, overtaking when there is incoming traffic from that other direction (cause they think it's safe to squeeze in as cyclists are small) or not paying attention to right of way signs. Speeding alone is a huge problem. I would take self driving cars even if far from perfect just because of it. It will be safer if they don't speed even if they sometimes randomly drive into other vehicles. Everything is secondary when it comes to safety. It really is obvious when you move from a place where people don't respect speed limits to one where they do. I think not speeding solves 95%+ of serious safety problems.
• dotancohen 3y ago
  The converse argument is that human drivers hit cyclists everyday, and we never hear about them because they are not unusual.