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Comment by Faark | Hacker News Reader

> I would much rather be in a crash with a drunk driver where liability was clear than have my car drive underneath a tractor trailer in the middle of a clear day just because I hit some neural network edge case.

Preferring to die by human error instead of shitty software doesn't make logical sense to me and feels like your trying to justify something irrational. Autopilot either drives safer than me or doesn't. And I wouldn't let a drunk friend drive me either.

> but independent analysis shows there’s just not enough data to say

Do you link a trustworthy analysis? I can't remember reading one that wasn't from a highly polarized source.

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>Preferring to die by human error instead of shitty software doesn't make logical sense to me and feels like your trying to justify something irrational.

The poster, camjohnson26, did not say die, the poster said crash.

Camjohnson26's point as I understood it was to compare two situations:

1. A crash that occurs because one of the drivers was extreme drunk,

2. A crash that occurs because of an autopilot in one of vehicles did not make the current action.

In the first case most people and the legal system will likely conclude that the drunk driver was at fault. In the second case it will be more difficult to determine who was at fault. This second case may add legal, insurance and ethical complications that camjohnson26 wishes to avoid. For instance what if your insurance decides you are at fault for activating the autopilot under unsafe conditions?

> what if your insurance decides you are at fault for activating the autopilot under unsafe conditions?

Seems reasonable to me. The driver is always responsible.

Which driver? How do you determine it was actually the autopilot that caused the crash? What if it wasn't the autopilot?

>Preferring to die by human error instead of shitty software doesn't make logical sense to me

It certainly does if both auto pilot Tesla’s and standard vehicles are resulting in death, but the law will provide a remedy to your survivors and heirs in one instance and actually turn around and hold you liable in another instance.

After all the post was about liability and clearly nothing to do with how the poster prefers to die, which you somehow read into it.

This makes a lot of sense, and is actually seen a lot in the wild. Having control feels good for us, and I would argue that's probably why there is such a visceral response to drunk drivers---they're not in control. You can empathize with a mistake, but something just sort of happening with no real impact or control over it feels wrong.

That being said, I'm on board with the self driving cars, we should approach it with a logical head and really try to figure out what we should do, not what feels good.

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