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As it should be. “Safer on average” is not a defense for failing something as basic as stopping at a stop sign. The bar for not running one and killing someone
by TNWin 27d ago
As it should be. “Safer on average” is not a defense for failing something as basic as stopping at a stop sign. The bar for not running one and killing someone is not unreasonably high.
- ImJamal 27d agoHumans fail to stop at stop signs all the time. Their failure to stop kill people as well.
- unrented7977 27d agoAnd we take away people's ability to drive when they kill people.
- criddell 27d agoOften we do not. The Freakonomics podcast had an episode titled The Perfect Crime where they basically say if you want to kill somebody, hit them with your car because that’s often not punished beyond a ticket.
- lotsofpulp 27d agoThis trial just happened where there was no punishment: https://www.macombgov.org/node/55/news/former-warren-police-officer-found-not-guilty https://www.macombgov.org/node/55/news/former-warren-police-... >According to evidence presented from law enforcement at trial, on September 30, 2024, Burke was operating his patrol vehicle at a high rate of speed without emergency lights or siren activated when it crashed with another vehicle. Burke's partner was injured in the crash, and 34-year-old Cedric Hayden Jr. and 33-year-old Dejuan Pettis were killed. Then there was this one a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jaahnavi_Kandula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jaahnavi_Kandula https://www.theriolindanews.com/2025/04/22/529861/license-to-kill https://www.theriolindanews.com/2025/04/22/529861/license-to... https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/04/license-to-kill/ https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/04/license-to-kill...
- bdangubic 27d agoNot sure why you are getting downvoted here though yes, the system is not perfect, in some states more so than in others. it is a fine line between giving someone who deserves it a 2nd chance vs. someone with 17 priors. but guessing you would also agree that allowing "self-driving" tech to kill people on the road without any repercussions isn't all that ideal either?
- fn-mote 27d agoIt’s in the US. The “no punishment” might be related to the offender being a policeman. Amazing it went to trial, to be honest.
- marcusverus 27d agoYou can't compare autonomous systems that drive hundreds of thousands of vehicles to a single person. You have to compare it to hundreds of thousands of people. American drivers kill ~100 people every day behind the wheel of a car. If autonomy were 50% safer and was deployed at such scale that it replaced 50% of all hours driven it would save 25 lives every day. It would also kill 25 people every day. Sadly, many people will clutch their pearls at inevitable headlines like Bloodthirsty Elon Sacrifices 25 Innocents on the Altar of Profit Every Day! and, their emotions sufficiently primed, they will happily pull the plug on autonomy, sending 25 people per day to their deaths and feeling great about themselves as they do it.
- orwin 27d agoOk, in my country, you actually get your license removed and jail time if you kill someone (usually 2 years, up to 10 if you're drinking). Let's say Tesla kill 50% less than a human driver, I'd agree to give Tesla's board 50% of the sentence for each person autopilot kills. As an incentive to make the cars kill less.
- marcusverus 26d agoLet's reformulate it as a railroad problem. In the proposed hypothetical, if you effectively ban self driving cars until they're literally flawless, 50 people per day will be killed by human drivers every day. If you pull the lever and allow imperfect-but-better-than-human self-driving, 25 people per day will be killed by by autonomous vehicles. As a reference point, non-suicide gun-related deaths total ~45 people per day. What moral principle could possibly justify not pulling the lever?
- orwin 25d agoBut, even as everyone talk about morality as an ideal, no one really cares about it (else the world would be very, very different). What most people care about is feeling that things are 'fair', at least the appearance of fairness. I guarantee you that if a company accepts that it's board (or executives) get jailed if their car makes a mistake that kills someone, like any random driver, people will accept it.
- returningfory2 27d agoI agree; that’s why I think we need a moratorium on human drivers while we figure this all out.
- ray_v 27d agoThis also solves the rising oil and gas prices issue as well!
- msy 27d agoWe do tend to impose them on individual drivers who make egregious and consequential failures, that’s the point. If every car running the same software is functionally the same ‘driver’ this class of failure absolutely should trigger a moratorium.
- superb_dev 27d agoI think this is a fantastic distinction to make, and one I haven’t seen before.
- lotsofpulp 27d ago>We do tend to impose them on individual drivers who make egregious and consequential failures, that’s the point. Do we? It's a common saying that if you want to kill someone with no penalties, have them run over with a car. Then there are examples like these all over the place. Not to mention distracted driving and DUIs don't even get your license suspended in many or most jurisdictions. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/teen-who-killed-4-in-renton-crash-sentenced-to-prison/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/teen-w... >The Audi, which Jones had bought one month before the crash, was the third car he had totaled in a crash within 11 months. Speed was a factor in all three collisions, but police did not cite Jones in the first two crashes, prosecutors said.
- crooked-v 27d agoAlso see the 80-year-old woman in SF who killed an entire family at a bus stop, while speeding, while going the wrong way on a one way street, and was sentenced to probation and community service and banned from driving for three years.
- wat10000 27d agoIt should be a critical part of the evaluation. If you set the bar higher than “safer on average” then you’re going to delay the switch, and every month of delay will cost more lives. “Safer on average” is exactly when you should start using the new thing, even if it’s uncomfortable and even if it’s a low bar.
- ddj231 27d agoNo it shouldn’t. Low risk behaviors should equal low risk outcomes. If it’s safer on average yet causes low risk behaviors to suddenly become unpredictably dangerous, folks will very reasonably push back
- wat10000 27d agoSorry, I’m not following. What are the low risk behaviors you’re referring to and what makes them suddenly become unpredictably dangerous?
- mvkel 27d agoIt should be a defense for FSD to exist though, right? Net more alive people.
- saulpw 27d agoNo, because you can punish bad drivers, remove them from the driving pool, put them in jail, or in some way achieve justice (this may not always happen, but at least it's posible). There is no way for FSD to have any accountability, and so no justice can be served. "Sorry, your son was just unlucky that he was killed by the AI, but we can't do anything about it" is an intolerable breakdown of justice. Same problem we have with qualified immunity.
- maxrev17 27d agoYou can update software though, you can’t update a negligent driver.
- EA-3167 27d agoBut you can take their license, fine them, jail them. Corporations just pay a fine and move on. I don’t want that to be the standard for road accidents and frankly outside of this techie niche no one does.
- srveale 27d ago"Sorry, the driver could have turned on FSD, but decided to drive [drunk/tired/distracted] and killed your son. Thankfully we can ban them from driving for a while." This could play out a million times at the population level. If you can decrease the chances of needing justice in the first place, shouldn't that be considered?
- mvkel 27d agoWhat you're talking about is who to blame, not how to keep more people alive.
- 26d ago
- piloto_ciego 27d agoSafer than average is totally defensible, because every year the margin of what is "average" changes. I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass here, but if say, one person is killed by an automobile every 100m miles, if the next year the average is 0.999 per 100m miles, that's a good thing provided the trend continues. We should not step over a dime to pick up a penny.
- milch 26d agoI do think there's a point where introducing different failure modes is harmful. Say they end up causing more pedestrian crashes and more head-on & angle crashes (such as the one in this article), but less loss-of-control and fixed-object crashes. That would make it safer for occupants but less safe for non-occupants of the self-driving vehicle. Since the occupant is the ones engaging self-driving mode they should be the one carrying the risk, so IMO even if it reduces number of deaths overall it should not be allowed