6 ms·

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing

by ebbv 13y ago

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be human error. Now you might say to this, "Planes fly on auto pilot constantly. Every time you fly you're basically in the hands of software." And this would be true. But my response to that is: 1) The air is much less densely packed than the roads and highways. 2) In the air, even though you are traveling much, much faster than in a car, the pilots have more time to react to a problem than a driver in a car. 3) The pilots are highly trained, experienced and hopefully alert. Drivers in automated cars will be complacent and texting on their phones. I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology, despite the fact that humans are shitty drivers. I think it's only going to exacerbate the problem, not improve it.

daeken 13y ago
Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.
- ebbv 13y ago
  If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. The roads are far more dangerous than the air, and this is why I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept of automated cars on the road and I'm not uncomfortable with autopilot in planes.
  - corin_ 13y ago
    > I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. Why on earth is dying due to a software error worse than dying due to a human error if you can chose one or the other, and the chance of a software error is lower?
    - heurist 13y ago
      Individual odds of being in an accident may be lower than the average. Software for all of the cars would be approximately the same, so the chances of being in an accident could increase for extremely cautious drivers. I doubt they would, personally, but it would be an argument against adoption until the cars are demonstrably safer than possible with human drivers.
      - corin_ 13y ago
        If the chance of an accident increases then sure, be against that. And I've no idea what the chances are. But to say you'd rather have a higher chance of dying from human error than lower chance of dying from software error... doesn't make any sense.
  - nightski 13y ago
    The truth is our lives are in the hands of more software programs than we may care to admit.
  - Amadou 13y ago
    the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. There are only so many things bad human drivers can do, the physics is pretty limiting. It isn't like they can teleport in front of another car. Even the craziest things like opposing traffic jumping the median into oncoming traffic isn't all that crazy, it isn't conceptually different from a deer jumping in front of a car. I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. Hard to argue with that.
- schabernakk 13y ago
  You're right, but the software of an autonomous car will be held to much higher standard than just 'has be to better or equal to a human driver'. The whole thing gets interesting when you look at the judicial side of it: Who is responsible in the case of an accident? The car manufacturer (if it was a software failure)? Then even one accident triggered by it is too much.
  - mtinkerhess 13y ago
    For autonomous cars or not, whoever is liable in the case of an accident will acquire insurance to cover the cost of accidents. Currently, that's the driver. With autonomous cars, that may be the manufacturer, in which case 1) The cost to the manufacturer of insurance will be factored into the retail price of the vehicle and 2) The total cost of insurance will be lower because the accident rate will be lower.
  - turtle4 13y ago
    It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Hopefully society sees the benefits and gets out of the mindset you mention above (which I understand you are pointing out, not advocating). The idea that 'even one accident is too many' is a joke when you consider how many accidents there are with human drivers, and yet we accept them willingly. If there are 30,000 deaths per year from human driven accidents, then surely the real answer to how many accidents by computer driven cars is acceptable should have an upper bound of 29,999, right? Why isn't it acceptable if it saves even one human life, rather than being unacceptable if it costs one? Unfortunately, we as a group don't tend to be very logical, and love to spread blame, so I am afraid we'll take a long time to start saving lives. The data on the self-driven cars on the road is pretty overwhelming that they are safer than human drivers, but unfortunately there will be those (as in this thread) who believe that is true of everyone but themselves. Its going to be a long road to acceptance.
- Osiris 13y ago
  I understand that you're talking about the interactions between real drivers and autonomous drivers. I still think that the autonomous driver will be better able to react to even a poor human driver than a real one. With all the sensors, they can detect when someone is drifting lanes, not stopping at a stop, etc. and can react accordingly with much more accuracy than a human driver.
apsec112 13y ago
"I'd rather it be human error." Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's more than the entire population of San Francisco. Think about that. Nine hundred thousand people. Nine hundred thousand corpses. If technology can prevent that, I'd say we have a moral duty to not only develop it, but to do so as fast as possible, before too many more people die early, violent deaths.
- ebbv 13y ago
  As I stated to the reply above yours; we're not talking about replacing all cars on the road with automated cars overnight. We're talking about selling automated cars alongside regular cars. So your argument doesn't really hold water. Yes if we had an automated car ready to replace everyone's normal car, we'd start saving tons of lives tomorrow and I'd be a monster for opposing it. But that's not reality, that's not what we're talking about. And what I'm saying is, I'm uncomfortable and see problems ahead. And I seem to be totally alone in this, which is amazing to me.
  - stephenhuey 13y ago
    You're not alone, but the reality is that the automated cars might react to the human drivers much more quickly than the other way around.
    - ebbv 13y ago
      I am sure that the automated drivers will react faster, but the problem is that they can only react to events they have been programmed to react to and only in the ways they have been programmed to react. There's no ensuring either of: a) It will react to everything that it needs to react to / not react to things that it shouldn't. b) It will react in the proper way when it does react. This is the problem. Like I said if it were all automated drivers on the road, I think we'd have a really amazing safety record. But the problem is that with human drivers and automated drivers on the road, the human drivers are going to do all kinds of stupid shit, and how much of it will be reacted to properly? I don't know. It seems to me most people on HN significantly underestimate the complexity of solving this problem of automated drivers alongside human ones. Plus, I am also uncomfortable with training human drivers to just trust the computer and pay no attention to what's going on around them. I think that's the worst outcome of automated drivers.
jjcm 13y ago
I politely disagree. Having driven next to self-driving cars for the past few years in the bay area, in my opinion they are far more competent than most drivers. They don't stop tracking the road to put on makeup or check their phone. They don't get distracted by the kids in the back seat. They have their sensors on the road constantly, and not just in front of them. They don't have blind spots. Will bugs happen eventually? Yes, then they'll be patched. New bugs will be found, but every accident that happens will make the cars safer. Each error improves how safe they are, and since they're currently safer than humans based on accident statistics, I'm more than happy to see something that's already safer get even more safe over time.
- ebbv 13y ago
  I don't think you read what I wrote. I said people are terrible drivers. I think likely a fleet of all automated cars will be safer than a fleet of human drivers. The problem comes in the interaction between automated drivers and human drivers. Among other things.
  - venus 13y ago
    The thing is, you're trying to say that automated cars are a bad idea, but all the arguments you make actually militate for getting rid of the humans ASAP!
    - ebbv 13y ago
      If you were going to pass a law against humans driving cars I'd be the first to vote for it. But as long as humans are driving cars, solving the issue of having an automated car driving alongside them is a non-trivial task which people seem to be underestimating.
  - sp332 13y ago
    I still don't get it. Maybe a computer could react to an erratic human driver faster. But more importantly, it can react more consistently than a human driver who gets tired or distracted (or confused by other humans' behavior). Edit: To put it another way, a computer that avoids common-case crash scenarios most of the time outweighs humans avoiding edge-case scenarios sometimes.
stephenhuey 13y ago
As a developer, I agree there will be bugs. However, I'm also well aware that friends of mine have written code with a much more stringent level of testing than the web apps I typically work on. No doubt much of the public will raise an outcry against letting computers drive for them, but if the number of fatalities decreases by one or two orders of magnitude, that will be hard to ignore.
venus 13y ago
I am under the impression that safety is already at least one order of magnitude better than a human driver. Frankly, I can't wait until the majority of cars are under computer control; it will be much safer. > I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology What a bizarre attitude you have there. What possible rationalisation could you have for this extreme, arbitrary prejudice?
jsight 13y ago
Here's a little comparison: Computer - Can see 360 degrees, 100% of the time - Can read the movement of obstacles in real-time, with very accurate estimate of each surrounding vehicle's speed - Can run 100s of simulations per second to estimate the odds of an impact - Can react almost-instantly with correct inputs to the brake and steering based upon real-time instant of surface conditions Human - Can react within .7 seconds with correct inputs to the brake and steering based upon real-time instant of surface conditions in ideal conditions - Can see ~180 degrees, with significant focal-point limitations - Can guess other vehicles reactions based upon experience Which do you think will have a better reliability rating in many typical driving scenarios? I'm not saying which way I lean on this. :)
krisoft 13y ago
A driver kills a dozen people in a freak accident. A real tragedy for everyone involved. A panel of independent investigators founds his action to be faulty. He goes to prison. Next day another guy, on an other road makes the same mistake... An autonomous vehicle kills a dozen people in a freak accident. Newspapers scream bloody murder. A panel of independent investigators determines a chain of causes. The Immediate bug gets fixed, and the inadequacies in the testing methodology is remedied. We all get to live a tinny bit safer ever after.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dylangs1030 13y ago
I have pretty solid counters to your objections: 1. Autonomous cars shouldn't really be impacted by density. You can only make a highway so dense...there's one-four lanes, and it's like minesweeper. You can be surrounded by six cars at a time, maximum (two on either side, one above and one behind). Density might increase the likelihood of an accident just because there's more objects in motion, but an individual autonomous car would theoretically account for this. 2) The entire point of an autonomous car is for drivers to not need to react to anything at all. So...I'm not sure what this has to do with risk. Maybe the drivers of non-autonomous cars wouldn't be safe...but that's the same situation as today. Autonomous car drivers could read a magazine in the middle of an accident. Who cares? 3) Again, my above comment, this doesn't seem relevant. I think you're being a bit hysterical, to be honest. It's a problem of math. You can model every possible interaction between the cars on a 3-dimensional plane with a finite number of axes. It might be complex, but we can program every single possible interaction and collision - and that's the first step to programming collision response. Basically, the takeaway is, I don't think there's a model of car interaction that isn't improved by having an autonomous car, even if only one car out of the two is autonomous. And I'm pretty sure this scales.

by ebbv 13y ago

daeken 13y ago

Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

ebbv 13y ago
If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. The roads are far more dangerous than the air, and this is why I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept of automated cars on the road and I'm not uncomfortable with autopilot in planes.
- corin_ 13y ago
  > I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. Why on earth is dying due to a software error worse than dying due to a human error if you can chose one or the other, and the chance of a software error is lower?
  - heurist 13y ago
    Individual odds of being in an accident may be lower than the average. Software for all of the cars would be approximately the same, so the chances of being in an accident could increase for extremely cautious drivers. I doubt they would, personally, but it would be an argument against adoption until the cars are demonstrably safer than possible with human drivers.
    - corin_ 13y ago
      If the chance of an accident increases then sure, be against that. And I've no idea what the chances are. But to say you'd rather have a higher chance of dying from human error than lower chance of dying from software error... doesn't make any sense.
- nightski 13y ago
  The truth is our lives are in the hands of more software programs than we may care to admit.
- Amadou 13y ago
  the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. There are only so many things bad human drivers can do, the physics is pretty limiting. It isn't like they can teleport in front of another car. Even the craziest things like opposing traffic jumping the median into oncoming traffic isn't all that crazy, it isn't conceptually different from a deer jumping in front of a car. I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. Hard to argue with that.
schabernakk 13y ago
You're right, but the software of an autonomous car will be held to much higher standard than just 'has be to better or equal to a human driver'. The whole thing gets interesting when you look at the judicial side of it: Who is responsible in the case of an accident? The car manufacturer (if it was a software failure)? Then even one accident triggered by it is too much.
- mtinkerhess 13y ago
  For autonomous cars or not, whoever is liable in the case of an accident will acquire insurance to cover the cost of accidents. Currently, that's the driver. With autonomous cars, that may be the manufacturer, in which case 1) The cost to the manufacturer of insurance will be factored into the retail price of the vehicle and 2) The total cost of insurance will be lower because the accident rate will be lower.
- turtle4 13y ago
  It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Hopefully society sees the benefits and gets out of the mindset you mention above (which I understand you are pointing out, not advocating). The idea that 'even one accident is too many' is a joke when you consider how many accidents there are with human drivers, and yet we accept them willingly. If there are 30,000 deaths per year from human driven accidents, then surely the real answer to how many accidents by computer driven cars is acceptable should have an upper bound of 29,999, right? Why isn't it acceptable if it saves even one human life, rather than being unacceptable if it costs one? Unfortunately, we as a group don't tend to be very logical, and love to spread blame, so I am afraid we'll take a long time to start saving lives. The data on the self-driven cars on the road is pretty overwhelming that they are safer than human drivers, but unfortunately there will be those (as in this thread) who believe that is true of everyone but themselves. Its going to be a long road to acceptance.
Osiris 13y ago
I understand that you're talking about the interactions between real drivers and autonomous drivers. I still think that the autonomous driver will be better able to react to even a poor human driver than a real one. With all the sensors, they can detect when someone is drifting lanes, not stopping at a stop, etc. and can react accordingly with much more accuracy than a human driver.

apsec112 13y ago

"I'd rather it be human error." Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's more than the entire population of San Francisco. Think about that. Nine hundred thousand people. Nine hundred thousand corpses. If technology can prevent that, I'd say we have a moral duty to not only develop it, but to do so as fast as possible, before too many more people die early, violent deaths.

ebbv 13y ago
As I stated to the reply above yours; we're not talking about replacing all cars on the road with automated cars overnight. We're talking about selling automated cars alongside regular cars. So your argument doesn't really hold water. Yes if we had an automated car ready to replace everyone's normal car, we'd start saving tons of lives tomorrow and I'd be a monster for opposing it. But that's not reality, that's not what we're talking about. And what I'm saying is, I'm uncomfortable and see problems ahead. And I seem to be totally alone in this, which is amazing to me.
- stephenhuey 13y ago
  You're not alone, but the reality is that the automated cars might react to the human drivers much more quickly than the other way around.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    I am sure that the automated drivers will react faster, but the problem is that they can only react to events they have been programmed to react to and only in the ways they have been programmed to react. There's no ensuring either of: a) It will react to everything that it needs to react to / not react to things that it shouldn't. b) It will react in the proper way when it does react. This is the problem. Like I said if it were all automated drivers on the road, I think we'd have a really amazing safety record. But the problem is that with human drivers and automated drivers on the road, the human drivers are going to do all kinds of stupid shit, and how much of it will be reacted to properly? I don't know. It seems to me most people on HN significantly underestimate the complexity of solving this problem of automated drivers alongside human ones. Plus, I am also uncomfortable with training human drivers to just trust the computer and pay no attention to what's going on around them. I think that's the worst outcome of automated drivers.

jjcm 13y ago

I politely disagree. Having driven next to self-driving cars for the past few years in the bay area, in my opinion they are far more competent than most drivers. They don't stop tracking the road to put on makeup or check their phone. They don't get distracted by the kids in the back seat. They have their sensors on the road constantly, and not just in front of them. They don't have blind spots. Will bugs happen eventually? Yes, then they'll be patched. New bugs will be found, but every accident that happens will make the cars safer. Each error improves how safe they are, and since they're currently safer than humans based on accident statistics, I'm more than happy to see something that's already safer get even more safe over time.

ebbv 13y ago
I don't think you read what I wrote. I said people are terrible drivers. I think likely a fleet of all automated cars will be safer than a fleet of human drivers. The problem comes in the interaction between automated drivers and human drivers. Among other things.
- venus 13y ago
  The thing is, you're trying to say that automated cars are a bad idea, but all the arguments you make actually militate for getting rid of the humans ASAP!
  - ebbv 13y ago
    If you were going to pass a law against humans driving cars I'd be the first to vote for it. But as long as humans are driving cars, solving the issue of having an automated car driving alongside them is a non-trivial task which people seem to be underestimating.
- sp332 13y ago
  I still don't get it. Maybe a computer could react to an erratic human driver faster. But more importantly, it can react more consistently than a human driver who gets tired or distracted (or confused by other humans' behavior). Edit: To put it another way, a computer that avoids common-case crash scenarios most of the time outweighs humans avoiding edge-case scenarios sometimes.

stephenhuey 13y ago

As a developer, I agree there will be bugs. However, I'm also well aware that friends of mine have written code with a much more stringent level of testing than the web apps I typically work on. No doubt much of the public will raise an outcry against letting computers drive for them, but if the number of fatalities decreases by one or two orders of magnitude, that will be hard to ignore.

venus 13y ago

I am under the impression that safety is already at least one order of magnitude better than a human driver. Frankly, I can't wait until the majority of cars are under computer control; it will be much safer. > I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology What a bizarre attitude you have there. What possible rationalisation could you have for this extreme, arbitrary prejudice?

jsight 13y ago

Here's a little comparison: Computer - Can see 360 degrees, 100% of the time - Can read the movement of obstacles in real-time, with very accurate estimate of each surrounding vehicle's speed - Can run 100s of simulations per second to estimate the odds of an impact - Can react almost-instantly with correct inputs to the brake and steering based upon real-time instant of surface conditions Human - Can react within .7 seconds with correct inputs to the brake and steering based upon real-time instant of surface conditions in ideal conditions - Can see ~180 degrees, with significant focal-point limitations - Can guess other vehicles reactions based upon experience Which do you think will have a better reliability rating in many typical driving scenarios? I'm not saying which way I lean on this. :)

krisoft 13y ago

A driver kills a dozen people in a freak accident. A real tragedy for everyone involved. A panel of independent investigators founds his action to be faulty. He goes to prison. Next day another guy, on an other road makes the same mistake... An autonomous vehicle kills a dozen people in a freak accident. Newspapers scream bloody murder. A panel of independent investigators determines a chain of causes. The Immediate bug gets fixed, and the inadequacies in the testing methodology is remedied. We all get to live a tinny bit safer ever after.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dylangs1030 13y ago

I have pretty solid counters to your objections: 1. Autonomous cars shouldn't really be impacted by density. You can only make a highway so dense...there's one-four lanes, and it's like minesweeper. You can be surrounded by six cars at a time, maximum (two on either side, one above and one behind). Density might increase the likelihood of an accident just because there's more objects in motion, but an individual autonomous car would theoretically account for this. 2) The entire point of an autonomous car is for drivers to not need to react to anything at all. So...I'm not sure what this has to do with risk. Maybe the drivers of non-autonomous cars wouldn't be safe...but that's the same situation as today. Autonomous car drivers could read a magazine in the middle of an accident. Who cares? 3) Again, my above comment, this doesn't seem relevant. I think you're being a bit hysterical, to be honest. It's a problem of math. You can model every possible interaction between the cars on a 3-dimensional plane with a finite number of axes. It might be complex, but we can program every single possible interaction and collision - and that's the first step to programming collision response. Basically, the takeaway is, I don't think there's a model of car interaction that isn't improved by having an autonomous car, even if only one car out of the two is autonomous. And I'm pretty sure this scales.