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... I don't know. Many people are in accidents that are entirely not their fault, e.g. being rear-ended. You can't do anything about those who drive unsafely,

... I don't know. Many people are in accidents that are entirely not their fault, e.g. being rear-ended. You can't do anything about those who drive unsafely, distracted, under the influence, etc. Assuming you have a "good" driver, there are still plenty of times they might be into accidents for reasons that aren't because of awareness. For example, road conditions, behavior of other drivers, and just normal, honest mistakes. At least for me, my own sense aren't really the limiting factor in my safety. My eyes are good enough. Modern cars have the equivalent of bowling lane bumpers with auto-centering, pre-collision warning, and blind spot warning/indicators.

crazygringo 2y ago
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Your eyes aren't good enough, compared to if you had 360° LIDAR awareness, which is the comparison here. You're listing all these other causes of accidents, which no one disputes. There's still a whole range of accidents caused by limitations in our spatial awareness because we can only ever be looking in one direction at a time. You're talking about "normal, honest mistakes". That's what I'm talking about. There would be less of those if we had magic 360° LIDAR in our bodies. A lot less. Especially at night, but during the day too. This isn't about blaming anybody. It's just the simple scientific fact that human senses are limited, and self-driving cars shouldn't limit themselves to human senses. Human senses aren't good enough for preventing all preventable accidents, no matter how "honest" drivers are.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  The question was: > Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? I'm saying that human vision is not the cause of most accidents. Most accidents are caused by distraction, incorrect decisions/errors of judgement, road conditions, etc.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    And I'm saying a ton of those "incorrect decisions/errors of judgement" would no longer exist if we had superhuman LIDAR abilities. You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities. Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents. But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      > No more blind spots, no more missing objects because you were looking in one spot instead of another. No more missing dark objects at night. Of these, only dark objects at night is related to lidar vs vision. What percent of accidents is attributable to not seeing dark objects at night? Limited field of view is solved by having a bunch of cameras, that is what is orthogonal to LiDAR vs vision. I’m open to an argument here, but you have not provided any compelling rebuttal. You apparently feel like you have, though.
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        What are you even talking about? You use some made-up idea like "superhuman vision" and then you're asserting that I haven't provided a "compelling rebuttal"? You're not engaging in good-faith conversation here. If you want to understand the clear, obvious benefits of LIDAR over cameras, it's a Google search away. And it's not just about at night -- it's about weather, it's about greater accuracy, especially at greater distances, it's about more accurate velocity, and so forth. It's not rocket science to understand that earlier, more confident detection of a car or deer or child suddenly moving into the street is going to reduce collisions.
        pfannkuchen 2y ago
        Maybe I need to explain better. Obviously LiDAR improves the maximum achievable capabilities of a self driving system. I am not disputing that. I don’t think anyone would or could dispute that, it’s just trivially true. The point I am trying to make is more nuanced than that. Basically I’m thinking about whether this decision to ditch lidar is actually stupid, or if there could be a sensible explanation that is plausibly true. I am proposing what I believe is a plausibly true sensible explanation for the decision. If you think about whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar, the answer is again obviously yes. But if you think about this as a business decision, it is not so simple. The question is not whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar. The question is whether accidents would be reduced enough to justify the added cost and complexity to the system. So then, how do we figure that out? Well, we think about the causes of human car accidents ranked by percent of car accidents caused. What would be the items in the top 95% let’s say? Then, which of those items can be addressed exclusively by a lidar enabled system. To isolate can-only-be-fixed-by-lidar problems, I imagine a thought experiment where we have a human with lidar for eyeballs. Which of the top k causes of accidents would be fixed by giving humans lidar eyeballs. Well, maybe not that many, actually. That is my point. This could be argued to be immoral due to I guess making decisions about death based on business considerations. But it’s probably fairly easy to convince oneself as a Tesla executive that the car (M3 anyway) being affordable is critical to getting the safer-than-human driving tech adopted, so making the car more expensive actually fails to save more people than the lidar would save, etc.

crazygringo 2y ago

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Your eyes aren't good enough, compared to if you had 360° LIDAR awareness, which is the comparison here. You're listing all these other causes of accidents, which no one disputes. There's still a whole range of accidents caused by limitations in our spatial awareness because we can only ever be looking in one direction at a time. You're talking about "normal, honest mistakes". That's what I'm talking about. There would be less of those if we had magic 360° LIDAR in our bodies. A lot less. Especially at night, but during the day too. This isn't about blaming anybody. It's just the simple scientific fact that human senses are limited, and self-driving cars shouldn't limit themselves to human senses. Human senses aren't good enough for preventing all preventable accidents, no matter how "honest" drivers are.

shepherdjerred 2y ago
The question was: > Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? I'm saying that human vision is not the cause of most accidents. Most accidents are caused by distraction, incorrect decisions/errors of judgement, road conditions, etc.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  And I'm saying a ton of those "incorrect decisions/errors of judgement" would no longer exist if we had superhuman LIDAR abilities. You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities. Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents. But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    > No more blind spots, no more missing objects because you were looking in one spot instead of another. No more missing dark objects at night. Of these, only dark objects at night is related to lidar vs vision. What percent of accidents is attributable to not seeing dark objects at night? Limited field of view is solved by having a bunch of cameras, that is what is orthogonal to LiDAR vs vision. I’m open to an argument here, but you have not provided any compelling rebuttal. You apparently feel like you have, though.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      What are you even talking about? You use some made-up idea like "superhuman vision" and then you're asserting that I haven't provided a "compelling rebuttal"? You're not engaging in good-faith conversation here. If you want to understand the clear, obvious benefits of LIDAR over cameras, it's a Google search away. And it's not just about at night -- it's about weather, it's about greater accuracy, especially at greater distances, it's about more accurate velocity, and so forth. It's not rocket science to understand that earlier, more confident detection of a car or deer or child suddenly moving into the street is going to reduce collisions.
      - pfannkuchen 2y ago
        Maybe I need to explain better. Obviously LiDAR improves the maximum achievable capabilities of a self driving system. I am not disputing that. I don’t think anyone would or could dispute that, it’s just trivially true. The point I am trying to make is more nuanced than that. Basically I’m thinking about whether this decision to ditch lidar is actually stupid, or if there could be a sensible explanation that is plausibly true. I am proposing what I believe is a plausibly true sensible explanation for the decision. If you think about whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar, the answer is again obviously yes. But if you think about this as a business decision, it is not so simple. The question is not whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar. The question is whether accidents would be reduced enough to justify the added cost and complexity to the system. So then, how do we figure that out? Well, we think about the causes of human car accidents ranked by percent of car accidents caused. What would be the items in the top 95% let’s say? Then, which of those items can be addressed exclusively by a lidar enabled system. To isolate can-only-be-fixed-by-lidar problems, I imagine a thought experiment where we have a human with lidar for eyeballs. Which of the top k causes of accidents would be fixed by giving humans lidar eyeballs. Well, maybe not that many, actually. That is my point. This could be argued to be immoral due to I guess making decisions about death based on business considerations. But it’s probably fairly easy to convince oneself as a Tesla executive that the car (M3 anyway) being affordable is critical to getting the safer-than-human driving tech adopted, so making the car more expensive actually fails to save more people than the lidar would save, etc.