Serious question.
We, as a society, are about to learn some hard lessons about software. As in, deuteronomy-level lessons - things that will be (figuratively) carved into stone.
We will gain a new appreciation for the value of human decision making.
A pretty big chunk of automobile collisions are directly attributable to poor human decision making.
For example, nearly 1/3 of fatal collisions in the US involve a driver with a BAC of 0.08 or higher.
PS: Drunk driving is stupid and dangerous, but poor statistics bother me. Drunk drivers are more often night time drivers adjusting for that closer to ~1/4.
Do you have a good source that tracks fault in alcohol involved collisions? (I'm not trying to argue, I'm curious to look at it)
121 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among U.S. adults each year
Just remember, even if you are sober, driving home from a party at 3AM is still significantly more dangerous than average.
I sloppily implied causation above, but I didn't actually say 1/3 of crashes are attributable to alcohol, I said that a "big chunk" are attributable to poor decisions and separately pointed out the large percentage of fatal crashes involving alcohol.
Anyway, 1/4 is from someone with access to raw data who spent some time trying to get less biased numbers. So, wider error bars than NTSB estimates, but less biased assumptions.
Drunk driving is still a major issue, but there is a reason people are still spouting 20 year old data. When trying to make a point there is a tendency to cherry pick to the point of distortion.
For example - I was nearly rear ended by another driver, but I noticed they were failing to brake and pulled into an oncoming traffic lane (after checking there was no oncoming traffic of course). I would not have been at fault but also managed to avoid the accident altogether.
Also just because you aren't "legally" at fault doesn't necessarily mean the accident wasn't a result of poor judgement on your behalf.
For example, slamming on one's brakes noticing you're about to miss a turn you need to take and you get rear ended. You won't be legally found "at fault" but the accident is largely "your fault" for unpredictable driving, slamming on your brakes, and having been so inattentive to have nearly missed your turn.
So I think we're at least comparing apples to apples.
Would you elaborate on this? I read this as meaning that the statistic includes drunk drivers who were involved in a fatal accident but weren't determined to be at fault for causing the accident. Am I understanding your intent correctly?
Assuming this to be the case, I agree that there should be some additional nuance here. That said, it would also need to take into account whether or not their inebriation prevented them from acting defensively to avoid the accident. I'm not sure how this would be done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_driving_in_the_United_St...
Also of note: "On average, about 60% of the BAC values are missing or unknown. To analyze what they believe is the complete data, statisticians simulate BAC information.[7] Drivers with a BAC of 0.10% are 6 to 12 times more likely to get into a fatal crash or injury than drivers with no alcohol."
(According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 35,092 people died in traffic crashes in 2015 in the United States (latest figures available), including an estimated 10,265 people who were killed in drunk driving crashes involving a driver with an illegal BAC (.08 or greater). Among the people killed in these drunk driving crashes, 67% (6,865) were in crashes in which at least one driver in the crash had a BAC of .15 or higher.
From https://responsibility.org/get-the-facts/research/statistics...
So unless they are gravely misrepresenting the numbers, it's 29% of fatalities involving a driver with an illegal BAC.
(again not trying to argue, I'm sure there are fatalities involving alcohol that are not attributable to the impairment, just adding clarification about where my statement came from).
Anyway, to be pedantic 29.0% is closer to 25.0% -4% than 33.3% + 4.3%. But, it's also 'close to' 1/4, so I don't have an issue with your phrasing.
However, as you note this is 'involving' a drunk driver. So, that 29% is inflated by cases where the sober driver struck a drunk one. </ done beating a decaying equine.>
This is a flawed comparison because failing to update your software or keep your tires inflated or clean off your sensors would also be human decisions that could lead to adverse outcomes with self-driving cars.
Non-driving-operation decisions like that are applicable to both regular and self-driving cars.
I also expect that automatic systems will greatly improve the level of maintenance of vehicles (for example, mandatory tire pressure monitoring already does...).
It's incredibly simple to remove humans from those decisions. Just have the self-driving code refuse to engage until the issue is resolved.
Calling an ambulance is currently the recommended thing to do in severe medical emergencies anyway.
For other concerns about availability, adjust maintenance inspections and routines as necessary. For example, if you live somewhere there is no ambulance service and someone is of uncertain health, maybe inspect the tires every day (this sounds tedious but look at the alternative you are proposing, having a tire blow out while delivering dying Grandma to the ER).
Bad example--the majority of the lessons in Deuteronomy are shit, especially in a modern society, and were almost never taken literally through most of their history.
As an added bonus I can turn it on in a traffic jam and relax as that's stressful but not fast enough to be dangerous.
Btw, what is the death/accident rates for non-drunk people? Including accudents from drunk drivers crashing into them.
a. 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven as an average driver[0]
b. .5 fatalities per 100 million miles driven as robo driver
c. .25 fatalities per 100 million miles driven as 20-70 sober well rested driver
I'm 31yr old male so I have an average life expectancy of 47 more years.
That means I lose about .5/100 million * 47 yrs * 365days * 24hrs * 60mins * 60s = 7.4 seconds life lost per mile in robo-car. Sober/well-rested that drops to 3.7 seconds of life lost per mile.
So I'd be giving up 3.7 seconds of life to be able to read/work/sleep instead of drive for every mile. For me this is a good deal @ high speeds(trade 3.7 seconds of life for a minute of time), and an absolute steal at lower speeds(usual commute averages 4 minutes/mile.)
But I don't think that most people would get into a car that was twice as likely to crash as an average human driver (including drunks and so forth). Which suggests that most people have a different approach to this question.
The gains from coordinated robotic driving could very well be enough to actually reduce speed limits by a significant value, which not only reduces overall fatalities (due to laws of physics), but also makes the equation better for the robotic cars, which might convince more people to switch, leading to a positive feedback loop.
That's an optimistic scenario, though.
I grew up driving with my grandparents who were over 70, and my friends/random people with a car who were under 20. I think that the decision would realistically be made mostly on how the question is framed.
"Will you get in the car that's twice as likely to crash?"
"Will you get in the car with grandma to go to the zoo?"
[0]http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/06/50444863...
Your expected gain would be nearly 5 additional years of life! Should I sign you up?
There are certain strategic times in life where you'd want to take this, though. Ideally after the kids are grown up and don't need you anymore (so you either drop dead painlessly & predictably, or get a nice long life in great health so you can see the grandchildren grow up), or if that's cheating, in childhood or right after college so you haven't invested much into your life yet. Same reason they sell life insurance.
Not taking the pill already of course risks dying in your sleep.
I've invented a teleporter that will reduce your commute to 1 second every day. The only glitch is that your molecular makeup may be incompatible with my device, and there's no way to tell for sure. If it is, you'll disintegrate instantly the first time you try to use it.
Don't worry, only 1% of the population is incompatible. From a probability standpoint, you should expect to gain more than 1% of your life in extra time. Care to give her a whirl?
Because your proposal is very different for two reasons. One risk vs reward. In the robo-car example the pay off is 20-80x of lost life to gained time. You get a lot of time for very little risk. But your example is 1.03x.
The second is the distribution of risk over the years. With the driving I take a little risk to gain a little time each day for 30 years. In your example I take all of the risk up front and then have small a pay out over the next 30 odd years.
Well said.
GM didn't get to play the engineering is complicated and there are always tradeoffs card with its ignition switches. (And, yes, I know this was a case of a known problem but product defects still usually trigger liability in any case.)
Talking about weird edge cases misses the point. Edge case = slam on the brakes.
For example, what if it's dense fast traffic (say, one car space between each car, 50mph) in random black ice conditions and sensors suddenly begin failing so the software no longer trusts is inputs? Based on recent good inputs, accelerating, swerving, or breaking are all dangerous, and based on the loss of "vision" continuing at current speed is dangerous. The safest thing to do might be to begin honking, flashing hazards, and slowing down very slowly, but could still be way riskier than just handing control to a human driver who (in this scenario) can still see.
I can think of tons of similar situations. I have a feeling a lot of folks who think it'll be so easy are people who have mainly experience driving in easy areas and conditions.
EDIT: I could have easily made the scenario way worse: the road is curvy, or random lanes are closing and reopening due to construction. Loss of visibility then means continuing straight has a high chance of causing a serious wreck quickly rather than maybe eventually
Still, no driverless car should ever let itself be in dense fast traffic to begin with. Only a human driver would ever be dumb enough to do something so stupid and dangerous.
I would expect all high speed roads to be continuously validated by the car network, mapped in detail and kept up to date by the sensors of each car as it drives it. Your car should be streaming a model of the upcoming road from the cloud and be able to fall back onto it in the event of sensor failure.
Handing over control to a human driver only works when one is actually in the car. And paying attention. And competent.
Then the human is no better or worse, no?
One of the improvements is that an autonomous car will avoid getting into a situation it can't dig itself out of. And, at times, it will detect those situations long before a human will.
My favorite counterexample for people like you is driving in Southern California in the rain. An autonomous car NOW is probably better than 25-30% of the drivers on the road in that situation.
I would assume that a self-driving car would allow more than 1 space between cars when going 50 mph, and probably wouldn't be going 50 mph when there's black ice around.
Hell, most humans wouldn't be.
Because, duh, something went wrong.
Human errors tend to be misjudging something and then getting into a situation that, due to physics, they can't quite get out of. So you can't quite stop the car in time and you hit the car in front of you at 15mph.
Car errors are going to be things like "I thought the tractor trailer was a billboard or a bird so I hit it at 60mph with no braking". Or "I lost all sensor data and got stuck in a loop so I drove off the bridge". It's a fundamentally different sort of error.
I watched someone driving on a nice sunny day on a low traffic interstate suddenly make a sharp right turn crossing our lane to fly off the highway and start rolling. I have no idea why this happened, but everyone in the car survived so it's not even part of the traffic fatality statistics.
It should be continuously preparing and revising a stopping strategy. It should even be able to do this with any half its sensors returning spurious or misleading data. Or even if all sensors are suddenly jammed, it should be able to blindly execute the stopping strategy prepared moments prior.
Although, another way to look at is: If you fall below the bar for the average human, including drunks/etc, aren't you by definition more safe using this AI system?
If your question/argument is: What about those who are safer than average - then i think the answer is, they shouldn't use self driving, only the "poor" drivers should. Of course the next question is how do you determine that.
Perhaps infractions on your driving record would inhibit you from driving. If you get caught for drunk driving, that's it, no more license, purely automated driving (even if that means no rain driving, etc). If you're above 70, or etc.
In fact some vehicles already have front crash prevention systems and stability control systems that automatically brake and cut the throttle (2 control axes).
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/automation-and-crash-avoid...
So manufacturers could build upon that baseline by adding more sensor inputs and control axes for collision avoidance. Instead of just braking when a large obstacle appears in front the vehicle could steer around obstacles, exert force on the steering wheel to prevent running off the road, limit throttle inputs when approaching curves, etc. Some aircraft autopilots already have similar functionality by automatically climbing to avoid terrain.
Obviously, a lot of people still die in traffic accidents. But the bar is actually still fairly high for automated systems. I also suspect (though I don't have the numbers) that even if automation were just for highway driving that would, by itself, significantly reduce the fatalities.
But...
It isn't just deaths that need to be prevented. It is a combination of total damages, delays, deaths etc. If self driving cars take forever to make a turn or have other AI failures like driving too slow, it won't be acceptable to a large number of people.
In addition, you will see a situation in the future where partially automated cars Level 2 or 3 are safer than current driving modes. That means that in order to go from level 3 to level 4, you need the car to be safer than level 3.
I want a fully automated self driving car so badly, but I suspect I have a long way before I can hop in a car with no steering wheel and sip an IPA while being rushed home from a tough day at the office.
So? That's something humans tend to do, and anyone trying to sell self-driving cars will have to account for it.
So now you are in an accident caused by someone else. If that accident would have been prevented had they turned on the automated driving system that is in their vehicle, then do you still prefer this? Is having someone to blame really worth being in an accident that would not have happened if the computer was in control?
So, is it truly reasonable for you to refuse to engage the self-driving system in your car, putting other people on the road at greater risk?
I wonder if there will be increased liability, both financial (insurance) and legal, when someone willingly chooses to take control in a situation that would be well-handled by their self driving vehicle.
In fairness, your operation of the vehicle has a substantial impact on the outcome of operating the vehicle, the the decision loop that your brain implements while driving is largely incapable of effectively processing and executing on the volume of information and variables that are in play in the circumstances that lead to high speed collisions.
Anecdotally you might feel in control, but it is probably worth noting that most people, drunk or sober, tired on fully awake, fully alert or texting, felt like they were in control when they were suddenly the cause of, or involved in a collision.
You also can't compare deaths per million miles if the self driving cars don't operate in dangerous conditions. You'd have to compare apple miles to apple miles and orange miles to orange miles. A lot of people die in car wrecks in bad conditions.
A car that only kills .5 people per million miles, but doesn't work in the rain, snow, dark, whatever, likely isn't safer than a person.