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Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

We should not make "better" the enemy of perfect or something of the essence. If we can have self-driving vehicles that are twice as safe as the average human, then they should be allowed on the streets.

https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-p...

I realize that accepting that a machine may kill you when you cross the street is a bit unsettling but if you think about it, it is no different than accepting that the person in the car behind you may have a moment of absence or not pay attention to the road end up killing you or a pedestrian.

Yet having another human kill another human seems to be accepted by society?

If car manufacturing companies take on the responsibility and financial burden on them to compensate families that are killed/injured by a self-driving car, just like insurance companies do nowadays on the behalf of the drivers at fault, then the problem becomes non-existent unless I am missing something.

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The article is saying that it may be difficult or impossible to prove that self driving cars are actually safe. The Tesla issues and recently released sensor shortcomings are damning and really put a dent in my faith of this technology.

An example from a recent road trip I was on: I was travelling down a suburban street with cars parked on the side of the road. There was a car parked with a relatively high undercarriage, so that from a distance I could see under the car through to the other side. I saw a pair of shoes toward the front side of the car, which I (correctly) deduced were connected to a human being. In anticipation of driving past a person who might step out in front of me I slowed down and made sure to pass safely.

Tesla, on the other hand will drive at 70mph into a concrete divider if some paint on the road is smudged.

We've got a ways to go yet I think.

I'm not sure why you are talking about tesla in a submission about self driving. Tesla doesn't have self driving technology. They only have adaptive cruise control and lane assist.

You really think Tesla is not relevant in a discussion about self driving cars?

> If we can have self-driving vehicles that are twice as safe as the average human, then they should be allowed on the streets.

Coal power plants kill about 100,000 people a year so a reasonable target for nuclear power is 50,000 a year.

Cigarettes kill 50% of long-term users so a good target for vaping devices is killing 25% of users.

I mean, it's not like we'd stop at 50% and call it good. But then we're at least reducing the number of deaths while we refine things.

I am appalled at statements such as "twice as safe as human". We should be comparing driverless technologies with humans assisted by the same technology running in passive mode.

Otherwise, you're implyjng that the developer of that technology would either release the technology as completely driverless or not release it at all.

> Otherwise, you're implyjng that the developer of that technology would either release the technology as completely driverless or not release it at all.

In some ways that statement is true. Ford and a number of other companies refuse to implement level 3 automation -- because of the switch-over costs and human-vehicle communication impedances which would almost certainly lead to more accidents.

You misunderstood that statement and said the exact opposite.

They refuse to implement level 3 automation, instead they roll out the same technology as driver assistance technology (level 1-2).

Find me a company that says that they have mind blowing level 3-4 technology and will not make assistive technology is with it. Ahh, there is one, Tesla. Autosteer is just lane keeping assist, but admitting that would mean Tesla can't claim to be futuristic. Why Tesla makes the claim "twice as safe as human" and refuses to give out assistive versions of it's technologies is horribly misleading bullshit.

Yup. If the computer works fine 99.9% of the time, there's just no way to keep the meat paying attention so it's there when that .1% situation pops up.

>> If we can have self-driving vehicles that are twice as safe as the average human, then they should be allowed on the streets.

Absolutely disagree with this approach. Self driving cars can't be merely slightly better than your average human - they need to be completely flawless. Just like an airplane autopilot can't be just a bit better than a human pilot, it needs to be 100% reliable.

Why exactly? Wouldn't that be akin to limiting medication to dried herbs of irregular purity and dosage because synthetic medicine cannot cure AIDS with antibiotics?

Even at the most risk adverse "needs to be better than both a human pilot alone or a human supervising it with overrides" would be a saner standard for autonomous operation. Since there have been cases of crashes from overriding an autopilot when it was judged as wrong but was actually right.

It's not the machine that killed you - it's the person who programmed the machine. If a pedestrian dies when a person is behind the wheel, there are any number of reasons: inattentiveness, drunkenness, anger - all very human states of being and emotion. That exact combination of influences will never happen again. And it could also be just an unfortunate accident.

But with an AI driving the car, some faceless person ran the numbers and decided that your life is worth some statistical amount. Not only yours, but all the people ever who will stand in front of that machine.

And that is murder.

We could give the AI's free will if we ever figure out how to encode that concept in terms a computer would understand. But that opens up a different can of worms because we are then enslaving a being with free will.

We could absolve the original programmers of blame - after all they were doing it for humanity or for the children or some other excuse. But then we have to decide how limited that absolution is.

Those are the kinds of issues we must address before we can fully trust an autonomous vehicle.

Can you define murder as you use it here?

I'm using the simple definition that murder is killing with intent, barring modifiers such as a state of war or emotional modifiers, which machines are incapable of.

Computer systems are deterministic - if we give it A, we expect to get B, not C or D in some unpredictable pattern. If we do somehow get C, that is an error, not an insight. If we allow that the machine is correct 90% of the time, it's still in error but furthermore we have now codified an acceptable error rate. A human or group of humans had to make that decision, because computers are incapable of deciding what is acceptable or not acceptable.

Ergo, when you step off the curb into the path of that self-driving car, someone has already made a decision that 10% of the time, you die. The stated intent might be to maximise the preservation of the lives of the vehicle's occupants or that group of schoolchildren or a dog or whatever, but the unstated intent is that someone has to die.

Which means it is codified killing, or murder. It is not a happy (or unhappy) accident of the universe.

By this logic doctors are murderers whenever they perform an operation and the patient dies, all equipment manufacturers that make something that's ever resulted in a death are murderers, all engineers of bridges that collapse under extreme conditions are murderers.

Really widens the net for the concept of murder.

If they ever formally codified the acceptable risk resulting in death and operated accordingly, then yes, they might be.

However, a doctor is not a machine - there isn't some piece of code that says 10% of all appendicitis cases die. Equipment deaths are usually operator error or perhaps component failure, etc. Bridges? Who knows?

The point is that an autonomous vehicle has a programmed decision tree where the others do not and at some point, someone has to have, or should have, taken into account vehicle operation under catastrophic circumstances.

Go read up on the trolley problem and tell me if I'm wrong in bringing this up.

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