6 ms·

Society will accept a death caused by a robotaxi, Waymo co-CEO says

37 points by c420 1y ago

tstrimple 1y ago
I think a lot of it will depend on the type of death. Pedestrians doing something most people acknowledge was stupid? Sure. A robotaxi going into Mad Max mode and taking a shortcut through a sidewalk? Much less likely. And there is a whole world of degrees of fault between the two. Ultimately the creators of the taxi service must be able to be held liable when at fault. In the era of sane governance investigations would be performed. Who knows now though.
techblueberry 1y ago
Well, of course they will since your army of lawyers will force us too, what choice will we have?
appreciatorBus 1y ago
“Society will accept deaths caused by vehicles, regardless of whether the driver is human, robot, dog, alien species, so that people with vehicles can go vroom vroom” - every car company since cars have existed. The issues of vehicles and the risk they post to people outside the vehicles are straightforward externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to. Every vehicle driven above a certain speed for a unit of time, whether with an human or robot driver, imposes a risk on everyone around it. (whether they are inside or outside of a vehicle) Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them. Of course this is simplistic and not perfect, but it would be a lot more honest than what we are doing today, and would align incentives to a safe future a lot better than what we do today.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  > externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to We have. We've optimized for economic growth of car companies and full car penetration into every crevasse of the built environment. It fucking sucks but if your goal is to have as much driving as possible the current situation is probably close to optimal. It's a problem of values not execution.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  The "simple" (as distinct from "easy") option is that anything fast gets a dedicated route that's physically separated - maybe by elevation or such - from everything around it.
  - appreciatorBus 1y ago
    Sure, so long as users of the fast dedicated route are the ones paying for it!
- efsavage 1y ago
  > Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them. I see your point but we're all imposing risks on each other all the time. I'm sitting on the 6th floor of a 10 floor building, presumably I'm at some non-zero risk of it collapsing, which would be lower if this building was shorter, but I don't feel entitled to compensation from the owner for the marginal risk because they wanted more floors. I think we've actually done alot better in reducing the externalities of direct vehicle deaths (insurance, safety standards, vehicle inspections, etc.) than we have in other areas (energy costs, environmental impact, city/street design, parking, etc.)
  - appreciatorBus 1y ago
    I understand there's some level of risk we all just have to accept from each other. I just don't agree that cars fall under that level. It's a huge step change from the risk that you or I will run into each other while walking down the street - suffering perhaps a bruise or two at worst - and the risk imposed on me as someone drives by in a large vehicle at high speed, with easily enough kinetic energy to kill & maim a dozen people and a building to boot.
- skepticATX 1y ago
  This seems roughly equivalent to liability insurance.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tbrownaw 1y ago
> The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: “Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?” Sounds like "perfect is the enemy of good."
- spwa4 1y ago
  Reality check: sounds like "who pays for this, and how much?"
shortrounddev2 1y ago
Americans accept pedestrian deaths caused by huge monster truck F350s every single day. Not that an AI powered car running people over is nothing, but nobody in the US gives a shit about pedestrian deaths
- potato3732842 1y ago
  ~20 fatalities per day. Even if you did all 3/4 ton+ trucks I doubt it's 1/day since they're less than 1/20th of the vehicles on the road except maybe in Texas or something.
  - fwip 1y ago
    I believe you're correct, but in the interest of drilling into this a bit - it looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths (based on 2021 data): https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-shows-popular-pickup-trucks-are-most-common-vehicles-in-pedestrian-and-bicyclist-deaths/ https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show... Pickups here making up about one in six of pedestrian deaths, and a little less than one in five bicyclist deaths. The F350 specifically is down a ways on the list, and I don't think Ford breaks their sales data down by specific model, but it does seem overrepresented vs the F150. Especially given that the F150 is more designed for "everyday" driving, so should have more miles, especially in areas where pedestrians are.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      > it looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths. It's all just a data mess and really hard to pull anything useful out of i. A bunch of SUVs are basically Schrodinger's car. Is a Chevy Suburban an SUV or a pickup? The part that hits you is basically a Silverado 1500. You don't know what bucket to put it in until you know what narrative you want. Ditto for many, many other models. And this complexity is then compounded by all the SUVs that are basically cars, Nissan Kicks and the like. But they're taller than historical cars, but their hoodlines aren't actually that much taller than current cars, which adopted their styling in part because of european pedestrian safety. And then when you look at historical data it gets weird too. Is a 2005 Outback an SUV. Most would say no, but Subaru marketed it that way because it was 2005 and SUVs were cool. But a 2015 Outback is pretty clearly SUV. There's also been huge changes in the SUV market over time. IDK what to make of it. We should probably be focusing on limiting car to pedestrian contact in the first place. >The F350 specifically is down a ways on the list, and I don't think Ford breaks their sales data down by specific model. 350/3500 trucks get weird because on one hand you have DRW cab and chassis that get turned into dump trucks and box trucks and stuff and those are basically indistinguishable from medium duty trucks as far as usage is concerned but on the low end it's still a single rear wheel pickup basically indistinguishable from a 250/2500 so you've really got two trucks there.
psunavy03 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
skepticATX 1y ago
It’s much easier to accept fatalities caused by other humans because there is someone to hold responsible. Will autonomous vehicle companies be held responsible when they cause fatalities? It also goes beyond just the total number of fatalities. Just like we don’t accept DUIs, we shouldn’t accept negligence or laziness from autonomous vehicle developers even if their product is safer than human drivers.
- wongarsu 1y ago
  On the other hand we have very lenient punishments for damage, injury and deaths caused by drivers, and are often reluctant to actually apply them. As long as no DUI is involved we are willing to accept a lot of negligence from human drivers
FrankWilhoit 1y ago
Society will accept a lot of unacceptable things. That, ultimately, is the problem.
- GaryBluto 1y ago
  If society accepts unacceptable things, surely that means they're acceptable?
  - iAMkenough 1y ago
    Society could also be broken. Society itself could behave in unacceptable ways.
qwertytyyuu 1y ago
America is a society that accepts regular school shootings. What society will accept is a low bar
- RajT88 1y ago
  It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that, and yet the problem remains. It is an emergent property of our political system.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    > It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that I'm not seeing any evidence of the other half of the US society not accepting school shootings. If people truly cared about it, you'd go out on the street and protest, and waging a general strike in school and related areas until something is being done about it. Instead 99% of the population seems complacent, and do mostly nothing about it, everyone (mostly) is still sending their kids to schools, teachers are still going to work and everything is business as usual.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      I think a very large portion of the 99% aren't complacent so much as they are not realistically able to opt out.
      - embedding-shape 1y ago
        Everyone is realistically able to though, if they're willing to sacrifice temporary pain. Many countries been through it before, and general strikes seems to have been the only non-violent way of getting wide-scale change enacted, and many of the people participating in those strikes "wasn't realistically able to participate" yet did so regardless. It helps that other countries have some solid foundation for doing general strikes, particularly when they have strong unions that make people able to strike yet survive and get food and shelter. But the upper-class seems to have anticipated this and fostered a really strong anti-union culture in the US, so now people have to suffer because there is no way of protesting, and there is no way of changing the status quo.
unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
We see with trains and jets that the public does not accept deaths with the same benign resignation as automobiles. The question is: will turning all the cars into a collective Borg operated by Big Tech upend our indifference to auto fatalities? Already we see that all the latest catastrophes from self-driving cars make much better press, so no, society will not give Waymo a “pass” for just killing a few people through a corporate cost-benefit analysis, particularly when those people never accepted the risk of dealing with Waymo in the first place. And you can substitute the name of any other car company there.
- RajT88 1y ago
  I think the people expect more from things controlled by a central authority. They have very low expectations of transportation operated by individuals. Much in the same way we have low expectations of other people in general.
- iambateman 1y ago
  That's an interesting comparison...I think you may be right in the long-term.
- ericmay 1y ago
  Auto fatalities are insane, and the US focus on build highways at all costs while out of the other side of their mouth parroting talking points about safety is one of the uniquely stupid things we do as a society. The safest car is the one parked in your garage. The safest driver is the one who isn't behind the wheel. That being said, I think Waymo is spot-on here. The US at least will accept deaths due to these machines - look at how we accept car deaths now - but the problem Waymo faces is that when these machines do kill someone it's not like automobile insurance today but instead it's a lawsuit every single time until/unless we construct a new regulatory framework to divest corporations from having real responsibility for the deaths caused by these machines. We shouldn't fight the technology, IMO, because I think over the long term it will be safer to be in an autonomous car. We should instead ensure that if such deaths occur, businesses don't get to step away from their responsibility and have to pay rather large sums. All that being said, all of the above is a complete waste of time and civilizational level resources. Most people should be walking, biking, and hopping on an automated rail line to get around. It's cheaper, healthier, and better in every way. And then when you want to take the car for that road trip or Sunday drive you still can.
condiment 1y ago
This is not a controversial take, the evidence already exists. There's a website tracking deaths associated with Teslas, including 61 autopilot fatalities. This has not deterred people from continuing to use autopilot, because using autopilot is a sensible decision. Use of autopilot reduces accidents sixfold in a trend that has been improving over time.[1] Waymo has better statistics and even better performance.[2] These technologies are going to change the world in a huge way. I'd wager that within 10 years, every luxury car will be outfitted with Waymo sensor kits. Nobody will care how it looks. Within 20, you won't be able to buy consumer insurance for a car you drive yourself. [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport [2] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
We don't accept factory robots killing factory workers. Why would a road robot be held to a lesser standard?
spankalee 1y ago
We already accept 40,000 vehicle deaths a year, 7,500 pedestrian deaths a year, 1,100 by police, 260 by train, and almost 50,000 deaths from falls. Nothing is completely safe, and it's just factually correct to say that there will be a fatal crash at some point that's the fault of an autonomous car (there actually have been already), but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers, and if that remains true, then society will "accept" it. Also, the question was literally "Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?" which is not great, IMO. What does it mean for "society" to "accept" a death? There will be lawsuits, regulations, etc. Is the question whether self-driving cars will be banned everywhere after one fatality?
- etiennebausson 1y ago
  From what I can find, those 7500 are 7500 pedestrians killed by vehicle a year, so we might as well round it up de 50k vehicular death a year and be done with it. Seems more honest.
- bluGill 1y ago
  > but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers Is that really true? the only data I can find is published by Waymo or others who are obviously not independent of Waymo. Is there any independent data or investigators in this? Until then I need to be cautious. The big question is are they really safer, or are they just safer if you include a few outliers (alcohol) that among humans are significantly worse. I'm not doubting the claim, and I've always though it is a matter of time before autonomous cars are statistically safer.
- Drakim 1y ago
  A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone. The same even stakes are not there with robots killing humans. For one side it's a life-or-death situation, while for the other side it's profit margins and numbers. Companies are usually very happy to increase yearly profit for something as minor as a decimal percentage rise in human deaths spread across society, that's not even controversial. Heck, not only can you not put a robot in jail, you can't even stop it from driving the next day as if nothing happened because it's duplicate running the exact same software and hardware is all over society. I still think robot cars is a good thing though, because they will have a lot less accidents than us humans who love to drink and drive, or speed for no good reason. Still, it will raise some big important questions.
spankibalt 1y ago
"Hope you enjoyed the ride, hehe!"
jmclnx 1y ago
Lets hope not, if so, here is a theoretical scenario: A person wants someone dead, so they hack into the system or hires someone to do so. Person is hit and dies. The heirs sue say "Waymo", but since death is "accepted", case tossed out and Insurance will cover it. We already know, there is no serious punishment to companies that is cracked, this case will be accepted. Now punishment it is a slap on the hand, just a cost of doing business. In this case, and others, we need these companies to be punished to the point where they are 1 step from bankruptcy and/or maybe the CEO and all their direct reports are jailed for a minimum of 7 years. And they can be sued in civil court. Without that, it will be mayhem on the roads, just as it is for Personal Information being obtained.
4d4m 1y ago
Then why do they sue the DMV to keep their accidents secret?
sceptic123 1y ago
Death caused by automated vehicle is not the controversial aspect, the difficulty comes when there is a choice that the vehicle must make between possible outcomes: * avoid crashing into pedestrian(s) but kill occupant(s) * crash into pedestrian(s) to save occupant(s) Real life trolley problem at work and programmed by someone somewhere
- tim333 1y ago
  Trolley problems don't really come up in real driving. If there are pedestrians in the way the driver, human or not will nearly always hit the brakes and that is unlikely to kill the occupants.
  - sceptic123 1y ago
    Swerving to avoid x but hitting y has a greater than 0 chance of causing an accident which is fatal for the vehicle's occupants. I'm not saying it's likely, I'm saying a human will make that call in the moment, and we may judge that human for the decision. But how do you feel if a self-driving car is making that decision?
poisonborz 1y ago
What does this sentence even mean? A regular car crash basically always has someone at fault, a reckless or unattentive driver, a service employee or a manufacturer. What does "death by robotaxi" change by that? That responsibility should dissolve, and people would say "oh it was an Act of the Algorithm, move on, it's still worth it?"

37 points by c420 1y ago

I think a lot of it will depend on the type of death. Pedestrians doing something most people acknowledge was stupid? Sure. A robotaxi going into Mad Max mode and taking a shortcut through a sidewalk? Much less likely. And there is a whole world of degrees of fault between the two. Ultimately the creators of the taxi service must be able to be held liable when at fault. In the era of sane governance investigations would be performed. Who knows now though.

techblueberry 1y ago

Well, of course they will since your army of lawyers will force us too, what choice will we have?

appreciatorBus 1y ago

“Society will accept deaths caused by vehicles, regardless of whether the driver is human, robot, dog, alien species, so that people with vehicles can go vroom vroom” - every car company since cars have existed. The issues of vehicles and the risk they post to people outside the vehicles are straightforward externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to. Every vehicle driven above a certain speed for a unit of time, whether with an human or robot driver, imposes a risk on everyone around it. (whether they are inside or outside of a vehicle) Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them. Of course this is simplistic and not perfect, but it would be a lot more honest than what we are doing today, and would align incentives to a safe future a lot better than what we do today.

giraffe_lady 1y ago
> externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to We have. We've optimized for economic growth of car companies and full car penetration into every crevasse of the built environment. It fucking sucks but if your goal is to have as much driving as possible the current situation is probably close to optimal. It's a problem of values not execution.
tbrownaw 1y ago
The "simple" (as distinct from "easy") option is that anything fast gets a dedicated route that's physically separated - maybe by elevation or such - from everything around it.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  Sure, so long as users of the fast dedicated route are the ones paying for it!
efsavage 1y ago
> Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them. I see your point but we're all imposing risks on each other all the time. I'm sitting on the 6th floor of a 10 floor building, presumably I'm at some non-zero risk of it collapsing, which would be lower if this building was shorter, but I don't feel entitled to compensation from the owner for the marginal risk because they wanted more floors. I think we've actually done alot better in reducing the externalities of direct vehicle deaths (insurance, safety standards, vehicle inspections, etc.) than we have in other areas (energy costs, environmental impact, city/street design, parking, etc.)
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  I understand there's some level of risk we all just have to accept from each other. I just don't agree that cars fall under that level. It's a huge step change from the risk that you or I will run into each other while walking down the street - suffering perhaps a bruise or two at worst - and the risk imposed on me as someone drives by in a large vehicle at high speed, with easily enough kinetic energy to kill & maim a dozen people and a building to boot.
skepticATX 1y ago
This seems roughly equivalent to liability insurance.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tbrownaw 1y ago

> The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: “Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?” Sounds like "perfect is the enemy of good."

spwa4 1y ago
Reality check: sounds like "who pays for this, and how much?"

shortrounddev2 1y ago

Americans accept pedestrian deaths caused by huge monster truck F350s every single day. Not that an AI powered car running people over is nothing, but nobody in the US gives a shit about pedestrian deaths

potato3732842 1y ago
~20 fatalities per day. Even if you did all 3/4 ton+ trucks I doubt it's 1/day since they're less than 1/20th of the vehicles on the road except maybe in Texas or something.
- fwip 1y ago
  I believe you're correct, but in the interest of drilling into this a bit - it looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths (based on 2021 data): https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-shows-popular-pickup-trucks-are-most-common-vehicles-in-pedestrian-and-bicyclist-deaths/ https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show... Pickups here making up about one in six of pedestrian deaths, and a little less than one in five bicyclist deaths. The F350 specifically is down a ways on the list, and I don't think Ford breaks their sales data down by specific model, but it does seem overrepresented vs the F150. Especially given that the F150 is more designed for "everyday" driving, so should have more miles, especially in areas where pedestrians are.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    > it looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths. It's all just a data mess and really hard to pull anything useful out of i. A bunch of SUVs are basically Schrodinger's car. Is a Chevy Suburban an SUV or a pickup? The part that hits you is basically a Silverado 1500. You don't know what bucket to put it in until you know what narrative you want. Ditto for many, many other models. And this complexity is then compounded by all the SUVs that are basically cars, Nissan Kicks and the like. But they're taller than historical cars, but their hoodlines aren't actually that much taller than current cars, which adopted their styling in part because of european pedestrian safety. And then when you look at historical data it gets weird too. Is a 2005 Outback an SUV. Most would say no, but Subaru marketed it that way because it was 2005 and SUVs were cool. But a 2015 Outback is pretty clearly SUV. There's also been huge changes in the SUV market over time. IDK what to make of it. We should probably be focusing on limiting car to pedestrian contact in the first place. >The F350 specifically is down a ways on the list, and I don't think Ford breaks their sales data down by specific model. 350/3500 trucks get weird because on one hand you have DRW cab and chassis that get turned into dump trucks and box trucks and stuff and those are basically indistinguishable from medium duty trucks as far as usage is concerned but on the low end it's still a single rear wheel pickup basically indistinguishable from a 250/2500 so you've really got two trucks there.

psunavy03 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

skepticATX 1y ago

It’s much easier to accept fatalities caused by other humans because there is someone to hold responsible. Will autonomous vehicle companies be held responsible when they cause fatalities? It also goes beyond just the total number of fatalities. Just like we don’t accept DUIs, we shouldn’t accept negligence or laziness from autonomous vehicle developers even if their product is safer than human drivers.

wongarsu 1y ago
On the other hand we have very lenient punishments for damage, injury and deaths caused by drivers, and are often reluctant to actually apply them. As long as no DUI is involved we are willing to accept a lot of negligence from human drivers

FrankWilhoit 1y ago

Society will accept a lot of unacceptable things. That, ultimately, is the problem.

GaryBluto 1y ago
If society accepts unacceptable things, surely that means they're acceptable?
- iAMkenough 1y ago
  Society could also be broken. Society itself could behave in unacceptable ways.

qwertytyyuu 1y ago

America is a society that accepts regular school shootings. What society will accept is a low bar

RajT88 1y ago
It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that, and yet the problem remains. It is an emergent property of our political system.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that I'm not seeing any evidence of the other half of the US society not accepting school shootings. If people truly cared about it, you'd go out on the street and protest, and waging a general strike in school and related areas until something is being done about it. Instead 99% of the population seems complacent, and do mostly nothing about it, everyone (mostly) is still sending their kids to schools, teachers are still going to work and everything is business as usual.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    I think a very large portion of the 99% aren't complacent so much as they are not realistically able to opt out.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      Everyone is realistically able to though, if they're willing to sacrifice temporary pain. Many countries been through it before, and general strikes seems to have been the only non-violent way of getting wide-scale change enacted, and many of the people participating in those strikes "wasn't realistically able to participate" yet did so regardless. It helps that other countries have some solid foundation for doing general strikes, particularly when they have strong unions that make people able to strike yet survive and get food and shelter. But the upper-class seems to have anticipated this and fostered a really strong anti-union culture in the US, so now people have to suffer because there is no way of protesting, and there is no way of changing the status quo.

unyttigfjelltol 1y ago

We see with trains and jets that the public does not accept deaths with the same benign resignation as automobiles. The question is: will turning all the cars into a collective Borg operated by Big Tech upend our indifference to auto fatalities? Already we see that all the latest catastrophes from self-driving cars make much better press, so no, society will not give Waymo a “pass” for just killing a few people through a corporate cost-benefit analysis, particularly when those people never accepted the risk of dealing with Waymo in the first place. And you can substitute the name of any other car company there.

RajT88 1y ago
I think the people expect more from things controlled by a central authority. They have very low expectations of transportation operated by individuals. Much in the same way we have low expectations of other people in general.
iambateman 1y ago
That's an interesting comparison...I think you may be right in the long-term.
ericmay 1y ago
Auto fatalities are insane, and the US focus on build highways at all costs while out of the other side of their mouth parroting talking points about safety is one of the uniquely stupid things we do as a society. The safest car is the one parked in your garage. The safest driver is the one who isn't behind the wheel. That being said, I think Waymo is spot-on here. The US at least will accept deaths due to these machines - look at how we accept car deaths now - but the problem Waymo faces is that when these machines do kill someone it's not like automobile insurance today but instead it's a lawsuit every single time until/unless we construct a new regulatory framework to divest corporations from having real responsibility for the deaths caused by these machines. We shouldn't fight the technology, IMO, because I think over the long term it will be safer to be in an autonomous car. We should instead ensure that if such deaths occur, businesses don't get to step away from their responsibility and have to pay rather large sums. All that being said, all of the above is a complete waste of time and civilizational level resources. Most people should be walking, biking, and hopping on an automated rail line to get around. It's cheaper, healthier, and better in every way. And then when you want to take the car for that road trip or Sunday drive you still can.

condiment 1y ago

This is not a controversial take, the evidence already exists. There's a website tracking deaths associated with Teslas, including 61 autopilot fatalities. This has not deterred people from continuing to use autopilot, because using autopilot is a sensible decision. Use of autopilot reduces accidents sixfold in a trend that has been improving over time.[1] Waymo has better statistics and even better performance.[2] These technologies are going to change the world in a huge way. I'd wager that within 10 years, every luxury car will be outfitted with Waymo sensor kits. Nobody will care how it looks. Within 20, you won't be able to buy consumer insurance for a car you drive yourself. [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport [2] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

We don't accept factory robots killing factory workers. Why would a road robot be held to a lesser standard?

spankalee 1y ago

We already accept 40,000 vehicle deaths a year, 7,500 pedestrian deaths a year, 1,100 by police, 260 by train, and almost 50,000 deaths from falls. Nothing is completely safe, and it's just factually correct to say that there will be a fatal crash at some point that's the fault of an autonomous car (there actually have been already), but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers, and if that remains true, then society will "accept" it. Also, the question was literally "Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?" which is not great, IMO. What does it mean for "society" to "accept" a death? There will be lawsuits, regulations, etc. Is the question whether self-driving cars will be banned everywhere after one fatality?

etiennebausson 1y ago
From what I can find, those 7500 are 7500 pedestrians killed by vehicle a year, so we might as well round it up de 50k vehicular death a year and be done with it. Seems more honest.
bluGill 1y ago
> but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers Is that really true? the only data I can find is published by Waymo or others who are obviously not independent of Waymo. Is there any independent data or investigators in this? Until then I need to be cautious. The big question is are they really safer, or are they just safer if you include a few outliers (alcohol) that among humans are significantly worse. I'm not doubting the claim, and I've always though it is a matter of time before autonomous cars are statistically safer.
Drakim 1y ago
A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone. The same even stakes are not there with robots killing humans. For one side it's a life-or-death situation, while for the other side it's profit margins and numbers. Companies are usually very happy to increase yearly profit for something as minor as a decimal percentage rise in human deaths spread across society, that's not even controversial. Heck, not only can you not put a robot in jail, you can't even stop it from driving the next day as if nothing happened because it's duplicate running the exact same software and hardware is all over society. I still think robot cars is a good thing though, because they will have a lot less accidents than us humans who love to drink and drive, or speed for no good reason. Still, it will raise some big important questions.

spankibalt 1y ago

"Hope you enjoyed the ride, hehe!"

jmclnx 1y ago

Lets hope not, if so, here is a theoretical scenario: A person wants someone dead, so they hack into the system or hires someone to do so. Person is hit and dies. The heirs sue say "Waymo", but since death is "accepted", case tossed out and Insurance will cover it. We already know, there is no serious punishment to companies that is cracked, this case will be accepted. Now punishment it is a slap on the hand, just a cost of doing business. In this case, and others, we need these companies to be punished to the point where they are 1 step from bankruptcy and/or maybe the CEO and all their direct reports are jailed for a minimum of 7 years. And they can be sued in civil court. Without that, it will be mayhem on the roads, just as it is for Personal Information being obtained.

4d4m 1y ago

Then why do they sue the DMV to keep their accidents secret?

sceptic123 1y ago

Death caused by automated vehicle is not the controversial aspect, the difficulty comes when there is a choice that the vehicle must make between possible outcomes: * avoid crashing into pedestrian(s) but kill occupant(s) * crash into pedestrian(s) to save occupant(s) Real life trolley problem at work and programmed by someone somewhere

tim333 1y ago
Trolley problems don't really come up in real driving. If there are pedestrians in the way the driver, human or not will nearly always hit the brakes and that is unlikely to kill the occupants.
- sceptic123 1y ago
  Swerving to avoid x but hitting y has a greater than 0 chance of causing an accident which is fatal for the vehicle's occupants. I'm not saying it's likely, I'm saying a human will make that call in the moment, and we may judge that human for the decision. But how do you feel if a self-driving car is making that decision?

poisonborz 1y ago

What does this sentence even mean? A regular car crash basically always has someone at fault, a reckless or unattentive driver, a service employee or a manufacturer. What does "death by robotaxi" change by that? That responsibility should dissolve, and people would say "oh it was an Act of the Algorithm, move on, it's still worth it?"