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And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries. Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone.

And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries. Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone. Also they will probably save most of those lives once they become good. The "least harm" approach is to scale autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible even if they do have accidents sometimes.

Earw0rm 1y ago
That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).
- sdenton4 1y ago
  Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    I don't think we are better off putting Elon Musk behind every wheel.
    - TOMDM 1y ago
      Good thing no one is suggesting that
      - rightbyte 1y ago
        I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?
        harperlee 1y ago
        Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos https://qntm.org/vhitaos). I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story: https://qntm.org/frame https://qntm.org/frame
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    This is a tradeoff, in which the original case might have been the less dangerous one. Autonomous fleets have a major potential flaw too, in form of a malicious hacker gaining control over multiple vehicles at once and wreaking havoc. Imagine if every model XY suddenly got a malicious OTA update and started actively chasing pedestrians.
    - sdenton4 1y ago
      Hm, so you would put a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as thousands of actual deaths caused by drunk drivers each year? 30% of us road fatalities involve a drunk driver each year... I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen, and further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths if it did occur.
      - inglor_cz 1y ago
        "I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen" OK, so you are optimistic. My own specialization is encryption/security, so I am not. State actors can do such things, too, and we've already had a small wave of classical physical-world sabotages in Europe that everyone suspects Russia of. "further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths" This is something I can agree upon, but you have to take into account that human societies don't work on a purely arithmetic/statistical basis. Mass casualty events have their own political and cultural gravitas, doubly so if they were intentional. Sinking of the Titanic shocked the whole world and it is still a frequent subject for artists 100 years later, even though 1500 deaths aren't objectively that many. I don't doubt that way more than 1500 people drowned in individual accidents worldwide in April 1912 alone, but the general public didn't care about those deaths. And a terrorist attack with merely 3000 dead put the US on a war footing for more than a decade and made it spend a trillion dollars on military campaigns, even though drunk American drivers manage the same carnage in five months or so.
  - Earw0rm 1y ago
    Because the baseline of human-operated safety is "get law enforcement to do their job of getting rid of the bad actors."
    - sdenton4 1y ago
      Why is that the baseline? Actual human performance as it exists today gives us tens of thousands of road fatalities per year in the US. We have not solved that problem despite decades of opportunity to introduce regulations and enforcement. Getting rid of human drivers looks like a very promising way forward.
      - Earw0rm 1y ago
        Because failure to solve it is political and intellectual laziness and cowardice. It's like jets falling out of the sky because the guy that bolts the wings on is only half doing his job, we can all see it and know about it and yet.. nobody wants to speak up.
  - manwe150 1y ago
    At least some of them will likely still occur as those people may decide to override the robot drivers safer choices to save 30 seconds or have fun

Earw0rm 1y ago

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).

sdenton4 1y ago
Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...
- rightbyte 1y ago
  I don't think we are better off putting Elon Musk behind every wheel.
  - TOMDM 1y ago
    Good thing no one is suggesting that
    - rightbyte 1y ago
      I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?
      - harperlee 1y ago
        Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos https://qntm.org/vhitaos). I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story: https://qntm.org/frame https://qntm.org/frame
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  This is a tradeoff, in which the original case might have been the less dangerous one. Autonomous fleets have a major potential flaw too, in form of a malicious hacker gaining control over multiple vehicles at once and wreaking havoc. Imagine if every model XY suddenly got a malicious OTA update and started actively chasing pedestrians.
  - sdenton4 1y ago
    Hm, so you would put a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as thousands of actual deaths caused by drunk drivers each year? 30% of us road fatalities involve a drunk driver each year... I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen, and further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths if it did occur.
    - inglor_cz 1y ago
      "I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen" OK, so you are optimistic. My own specialization is encryption/security, so I am not. State actors can do such things, too, and we've already had a small wave of classical physical-world sabotages in Europe that everyone suspects Russia of. "further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths" This is something I can agree upon, but you have to take into account that human societies don't work on a purely arithmetic/statistical basis. Mass casualty events have their own political and cultural gravitas, doubly so if they were intentional. Sinking of the Titanic shocked the whole world and it is still a frequent subject for artists 100 years later, even though 1500 deaths aren't objectively that many. I don't doubt that way more than 1500 people drowned in individual accidents worldwide in April 1912 alone, but the general public didn't care about those deaths. And a terrorist attack with merely 3000 dead put the US on a war footing for more than a decade and made it spend a trillion dollars on military campaigns, even though drunk American drivers manage the same carnage in five months or so.
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  Because the baseline of human-operated safety is "get law enforcement to do their job of getting rid of the bad actors."
  - sdenton4 1y ago
    Why is that the baseline? Actual human performance as it exists today gives us tens of thousands of road fatalities per year in the US. We have not solved that problem despite decades of opportunity to introduce regulations and enforcement. Getting rid of human drivers looks like a very promising way forward.
    - Earw0rm 1y ago
      Because failure to solve it is political and intellectual laziness and cowardice. It's like jets falling out of the sky because the guy that bolts the wings on is only half doing his job, we can all see it and know about it and yet.. nobody wants to speak up.
- manwe150 1y ago
  At least some of them will likely still occur as those people may decide to override the robot drivers safer choices to save 30 seconds or have fun