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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

The thing I continue to find interesting is the fear involved with an "autopilot" crash (even if this was not one).

Every day around the world, hundreds (1000s?) of people are killed in standard car accidents, whereas, as a proportion of the market, driverlss cars cause a tiny number of crashes, yet people panic, regulators bear their teeth and protesters speak up as soon as single accident was caused by (or assumed to be caused by) a driverless car.

I guess it is an illusion of control in normal cars, despite the fact that electronics should be better in almost every regard for safer driving.

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> despite the fact that electronics should be better in almost every regard for safer driving.

Maybe in the future. For now electronics are still handicapped by AI that is not anywhere even remotely close to humans.

"AIs" ability to reason about traffic situations and, by extension, planning are laughable and even if that properly worked it would still be handicapped by image recognition I wouldn't trust to tell a trashcan from a car.

At this point it's pretty obvious that until better AI comes along we're stuck with terrible. Certainly just pouring ever more resources into "current gen" NNs won't get us anywhere.

It's a matter of trust. Do you trust a robot to make decisions of life or death? You can't empathize with the robot, you know it can't empathize with you, and you instinctively don't feel like you can understand or predict the actions of agents that you don't empathize with and don't think empathizes with you. Humans make mistakes but they're understandable or comprehendible mistakes; with a robot you don't know types of mistakes to expect. You don't have a theory of mind for a robot.

> Every day around the world, hundreds (1000s?) of people are killed in standard car accidents

Hundreds? Lol. In India alone 150,000 people die in road accidents every year. That is almost 500 a day for 1 country. So over the world it must be well into multiple 1000s.

5000 is still 50 hundreds if you want to get pedantic.

There is a group of people who are into cars and who agree that autopilot is generally safer. They consider themselves being exceptional drivers (and to be fair they often are pretty good drivers) and therefore they think that in their particular case it's safer to not use it.

Of course determining so on individual feelings is dubious (and perhaps there is or soon will be no person outperforming the AP).

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