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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

The best way to stay attentive behind the wheel is to actually be the one driving. There's virtually no way of being both attentive and passive for long periods of time. If a driver can't check their email or whatever on their phone while autopilot is on, then autopilot is not safe to put in cars. And while I'm okay with not-exactly-safe for most things people willingly consume or use, driving is not an area where it's okay to roll out a feature that may cause people to stop paying attention to the road.

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>If a driver can't check their email or whatever on their phone while autopilot is on, then autopilot is not safe to put in cars.

Have you ever looked at other drivers on the highway? You see people texting, emailing, eating, shaving, doing their makeup, reading a book, the list goes on and on. If there is an activity you can do while seated, odds are people are doing it while driving.

That is one of the flaws with a lot of the complaints about Autopilot. The question isn't whether Autopilot is safer than an attentive driver. It is whether it is safer than the average driver and the average driver is not attentive 100% of the time. And there simply isn't enough data available in the public to say whether a Tesla with Autopilot is or is not safer than the average driver.

The problem is that autopilot might make people even more complacent.

> There's virtually no way of being both attentive and passive for long periods of time.

How do aircraft pilots manage it?

Airplanes are 10km up when cruising. Almost any error a pilot makes has minutes of time to be corrected. Contrast with 1 second while driving. Take off and landing are far more involved and take 15 minutes each (approx).

They take shifts.

Extensive training, restriction of hours worked, health restrictions (pretty sure my ADHD would prevent me from being a commercial pilot)...

Also, my understanding is that aircraft autopilot systems are designed to allow for pilot response to take up to three seconds. Three seconds on the highway is a lifetime.

Car driving also has health preconditions.

In cruise, it's extremely rare to be within 3 miles of another aircraft laterally and 1000' vertically.

Takeoff, initial climb, descent, and approach to landing are high workload times, easily holding the attention of the crew.

Cruise is much more relaxed and much less need for hair-trigger responses. My aircraft has audio and visual cues if an aircraft breeches a 2nm (or thereabouts) and is within 1000' vertically. Other than that, it's systems monitoring, weather monitoring, keeping up on the nav progress vs fuel remaining, and making sure the automation isn't trying to kill you, either subtly or acutely.

I've flown "right seat" (not pilot) a fair number of times. Air traffic control interacts with the pilot quite often and at fairly unpredictable times. This requires the pilot to be alert and respond promptly to a request or direction from air traffic control. If the pilot doesn't respond promptly, air traffic control repeats the request with more urgency and goes into the "lost communications" procedure if there is no response.

tl;dr: aircraft pilots generally must be attentive. Tesla drivers on "auto pilot" - not so much.

There are lots of differences, but one is that situations requiring aircraft pilot intervention often have a timeline measured in minutes. The recommended procedure for handling an emergency situation is to pull the checklist for that situation before starting to ensure you don't miss anything. Even urgent situations, like a TCAS alert, will often give 30 seconds warning. By contrast, this driver had roughly 2 seconds to notice that the autopilot was silently failing to handle the situation and to apply the brakes to prevent a collision.

Unlike a car, a plane at cruising altitude doesn't immediately crash into the one in front if the pilot doesn't pay attention for half a second, and despite their far higher absolute speed, actions performed when flying have a much lower relative speed.

For example, in a car, several seconds of following distance is normal and following another car that closely is common. In a plane, which can move in 3 dimensions, horizontal separation is measured in minutes and it's not that common to be following immediately behind another plane at the same speed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_(aeronautics)#Horiz...

Aircraft on most kinds autopilots crash into mountains without any intervention. They are mostly completely blind.

It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents.

A 0% accident rate is unrealistic and unfair.

Statistics makes for a tough sell to the survivors.

“Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”

Assume for a moment that vaccines could actually cause autism at a small rate.

Your argument applies there. "Yes your son became autistic, but someone else's son somewhere else didn't get measles and die."

I understand there are human emotions involved, but my opinion is that significantly reducing death count is still a better outcome. If we can't accept that noticeably better systems will still have faults, and that those faults will result in a different, but smaller number of deaths, then we're content asking for more deaths than necessary.

You don’t need to assume. With any medical procedure, there is risk involved. Including routine vaccination. That’s why there is a dedicated program to both report and compensate people who suffer adverse reactions from vaccines. See https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html

Striving for 0 accidents and only accepting 0 accidents are two very different things...

Ambulances save some number of lives. Ambulances are involved in some number of fatal accidents.

Should ambulances be banned? Subsidized? I can imagine different ways of analyzing the question, but asking "what would you say to the families of those who die" is a nonstarter. There's nothing you can say that will be satisfying, or ease their pain.

Statistics may be cold, but they're the only tool that actually lets us answer the questions like "would fewer people die with or without this change"?

On the other hand, people know who’s been saved by an ambulance. We’ll never know who was saved by the existence autonomous vehicles.

I’m just pointing out there’s a PR problem that may prove tough to manage.

You absolutely can't challenge someone's personal experience with statistics, but something about this line of argument still troubles me.

I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year.

Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy.

ON THE OTHER HAND...

We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers.

You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents.

If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers.

Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say.

The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.

People understand drunk drivers. They understand distracted drivers. They’re angry, rightfully so, but it’s a known problem and easy to comprehend. We can make laws tougher and feel good about it, even if it doesn’t help much.

It’s harder to emotionally cope with, I speculate, when someone you love is killed by a software bug, or by machine learning where no one can precisely explain why it made a certain choice.

I’m not saying I’m against autonomy. I just don’t know how to prevent it being caught in a backlash when people who didn’t have to die, do.

> but it’s a known problem and easy to comprehend... It's harder emotionally... when someone you love is killed by a software bug

Sure, I understand how a poorly designed steel guardrail can ride up the front of a vehicle and crush the chest of someone I had hugged a week earlier.

My sense is that understanding does not lessen the pain.

You seem to basically be trying to explain how hypothetical people that you are imagining could be experiencing pain that is more salient than mine.

I don't see how this takes us anywhere good.

> If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers.

The standard shouldn't really vary per-person.

If it's as good as a 50th percentile driver, it's good enough.

If it's as good as a 20th percentile driver, that's also probably fine.

You're right not to touch the mean at all, though.

> 50th percentile driver, it's good enough.

The problem is if there's any correlation with safe driving and early adoption, a median solution could also lower overall road safety.

For example, teenagers are generally more dangerous drivers than most, safety actually peaks per mile around 60 years old. 60 year olds are more likely to be at peak earning, more able to afford the latest car features.

You're probably right at 20℅ though? This all depends on the curve.

And there's a herd immunity, once most people are driverless, you can probably be less strict as roads become less hazardous overall.

We'd honestly probably make the biggest dent tomorrow by just finding the worst ten percent of drivers and giving them free uber/lyft for life. That would probably save us money as a society, money we could use on driverless tech.

Those aren't teenagers. Judging anecdotally from my time as an attorney, those are serially unemployed middle aged males with revoked licenses who somehow still own an old heavy truck and drive it on the sly with a bottle of something in the glove box.

If you read through case law that profile is weirdly common.

>We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers.

Not only drivers, but also roads. I would imagine most people using Autopilot use it more on highways than on city streets. The rate of accidents per kilometer is obviously much higher in the city where you have more complex situations and slower speeds. So when comparing autopilot failures we need to take into account not only miles driven, but where they are driven.

> It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents.

Eh, Tesla likes to point to this statistic every time the safety of Autopilot comes into question, but it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven.

Detailed data is hard to come by, but more nuanced studies have been far from conclusive in favor of the "Autopilot is safer than human drivers" thesis.

it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven.

True, and that kind of flawed argument bugs me. However, there is also data that showed that accident rates went down significantly on the same cars after Tesla first enabled autopilot via a software update. This is much more compelling to me; if the same people driving the same cars in the same areas became less likely to get into an accident as soon as autopilot became available, then I don't see how you can really argue that the feature is not beneficial to safety.

This sounds interesting. Are you able to remember where you might have read this?

I assume he's referring to the NHTSA study which was released on the last day of the Obama administration and purported to show a 40% reduction in crash rates. It's still the highest search result on HN for "Tesla Autopilot."

That study was later shown to have employed sketchy data and egregiously flawed methodology. A deeper dive showed that the crash rates may have actually gone up with Autopilot. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613

Thanks for the link. (No idea why your comment has been down voted, certainly wasn't me).

Happens on every Tesla thread.

The way I remember it, Telsa keeps saying something like 'Autopilot is way safer than all-other-road-vehicles-combined'.
What's the point of comparing Telsa Autopilot related crashes to crashes involving at least one motorcycle?

I think it's obvious the answer is: deception*.

That's one possible answer. If they're trying to make their car seem safer than other cars, it's a deceptive statistic to use.

But when the argument is "using the vehicle this way is a lot safer than the minimum requirements to be on the road", it's a relevant and fair statistic.

I'm not convinced that's the right metric though.

A more fair comparison would be: other drivers of similar demography driving other vehicles of similar age and specifications.

Why, though?

I could buy a car with 3 star crash ratings, and people would be fine with that. I could get in a taxi with a mediocre driver, and people would be fine with that.

Why does the comparison have to be to me driving, in a car like this?

When I'm shopping for a car, it makes sense.

But for public policy discussions, what matters is how the safety ranks against the general population.

I get where you’re coming from, and I agree there the needs of public safety policy and self interest don’t always align.

What I mean to say is, when car considering the safety data of any vehicle, it is insufficient to know that the vehicle performs better than whole-fleet.

It’s also necessary to know whether any particular vehicle outperforms others in its class.

One of those without the other is necessary but not sufficient.

More data is almost always better, but I disagree on what's sufficient. If a specific use case ranks moderately high vs. the entire US fleet, then that single piece of data is sufficient.

The driver that's above average but could be more above average isn't where we need to be fixing things. Not when there are millions of drivers that are either hyper-aggressive or senile still on the roads.

Okay, yeah, that’s fair enough.

The question is whether "Autopilot" is safer than "No Autopilot" ceteris paribus, because if it isn't, then a trivial regulation to make the roads safer with zero downside is to just ban Autopilot.

You can't determine whether Autopilot makes driving safer by comparing miles driven only on highways by Teslas to miles driven across the whole vehicle fleet.

> then a trivial regulation to make the roads safer with zero downside is to just ban Autopilot

That assume almost everyone using autopilot will replace that with manual driving in the same car. Some of them might get cheaper cars or take uber and end up less safe.

And even then, there's lots of stuff you can do to a car that makes it less safe that we don't ban, as long as it's still sufficiently safe.

If anything, increase safety standards. If you want to do something that won't cost extra money then do something to ban oversized cars at the same time...

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