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Comment by throwaway66920 | Hacker News Reader

You’re stringing together a few questionable statements here.

It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring?

On a quick search, 30% of fatalities involve alcohol. 7% involve rain (the most common condition that causes crashes).

Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk.

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> It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring?

My point is that trotting out the 1.25M number when we are very far away from dealing with the vast majority of it is distracting at best. We should instead be talking about the numbers of injuries and fatalities on the countries where autonomous vehicles are most likely to be deployed, and how many of those people could have been saved.

> Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk.

That's very true, but orthogonal to the point of using realistic numbers.

That seems like arguing about metrics for the sake of it. If we change the definition to be x% reduction in the rate of accidents relative to the expected rate if a non autonomous car would be use otherwise... you would get a similar rate of impact, normalized to a smaller population, limited primarily by rapidly diminishing economic barriers that don’t seem especially relevant to the argument at hanf

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