We regulate impaired driving, texting and driving, and a ton of other stuff. Yet tesla somehow gets a pass with autonomous tech.
When it's fully rolled out, it's going to kill a loooot of people.
When it's fully rolled out, it's going to kill a loooot of people.
The software will improve faster than humans will, as arguably, we've already hit our limit. Software doesn't get tired and it doesn't drive impaired. It makes mistakes, but so do we, and it's mistakes can be improved upon at scale. This is not blind faith in technology or software, but an acceptance of the limited capabilities of your median human (as well as the disadvantaged outliers).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/business/boryana-straubel...
This is not to say that software and hardware will not quickly overtake us, but while humans are on the road and in control, improvement will be possible.
You are right, the software should absolutely be held to a high standard (otherwise we're socializing losses and privatizing profits, also bad!), but please don't perpetuate a lie that existing drivers are held responsible to the degree they should for their mistakes (or even intentional acts) that cost lives. You'll find examples where someone is made an example of, but that is rare.
So disagree, please (checks and balances are important, as is the dialog we're having), but having seen what humans have to offer in this context, I will be the first, on my own time and resources, in front of regulators to argue for aggressive driver assist system development and implementation. Because the alternative is hot garbage we get by with because there are limited alternatives (ie no public transportation most everywhere and the inability to deploy it cost effectively), and we do a disservice to those who die or suffer because we could do better.
All depends on our faith in the system getting better of course. There's always going to be dissatisfying things surrounding it.
Gotta be up front about the state of the art though, can't let people sell a thing like it's the finished item.
Factoring in that bad drivers start being really negligent when there cars are “self-driving”, I'm not certain this will save more lives than the opportunity cost. But if it's mostly used by good drivers, and bad drivers get off the road, it could be huge.
I found lots of photos from the 50s trying to find more info
We will never get massive public transport, no matter how much money is spent. That is the harsh reality
Let's also assume our hypothetical public transport is built in San Francisco. San Francisco recently spent $1.5B on a 1.7 mile subway line. It will also take a decade from when work begun to its opening next year.
That works out to be a 9.7 mile subway that opens in 2032.
A million people are killed on the roads yearly world wide. How many deaths would you accept to reduce that to 10,000/year?
Zero.
As it stands, being able to blame Autopilot has a great chance of improving the system. What do you think happens when the Tesla Autopilot has one of its predictable jerks and maims a pedestrian? YouTube is full with documentation of just these kinda problems, and suing Tesla in civil court promises a lot more cash than some random deadbeat.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Because there is definitely evidence that shows that it is saving lives: https://twitter.com/Model3Owners/status/1383545728488808453
I think it is more fruitful to realize that humans also make mistakes. It may also be also beneficial to compare Human + FSD driving vs. Human driving (instead of just FSD vs Human).
What about when Tesla's marketing says FSD can do[2] things it can't do?
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/oey4g1/for_tho...
It doesn't mean they're directly lying, in the sense of "You can't reasonable get these numbers out of the dataset." But it probably means that there are some games being played such that the number you're getting isn't the number it's strongly implied (or, occasionally, outright stated) to be. Or, if it is, it doesn't mean what they'd like you to think it means.
So, if you go back a few years to the first waves of numbers Tesla trotted out to "prove" how amazing Autopilot was, you roughly had:
- The fatality rate per mile of all drivers, in all vehicles, in all conditions
being compared with:
- The fatality rate per mile of expensive luxury cars, driven by older, well off drivers, mostly on limited access divided highways, in "easy" driving conditions.
You can certainly do the math and get a comparison, but it's not a particularly reasonable comparison, because:
- In general, six figure luxury cars are really, really safe. They're big, heavy, loaded with airbags and safety features, and really don't kill people very often at all. You can go look at a breakdown of death by vehicle type and class, and it turns out that luxury cars are very much under-represented in fatalities.
- Expensive cars tend to be driven by older, more experienced drivers. There's a bathtub curve of fatality rates by age (https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...) - younger drivers without much driving experience die more, and once you get to 70+, your fatality rate goes up, but there's a sharp drop going to the 30-39 group, continuing to decline up to the 60-69 group. Guess what age range is going to be mostly buying Teslas?
- Divided highways tend to be fairly safe places to drive - especially in lower speed situations where a lot of people are going to be using Autopilot. You're exceedingly unlikely to die doing 20mph in rush hour traffic. Even running at speed, limited access highways are fairly safe places.
- And Autopilot simply doesn't work in bad enough weather. Again, a lot of traffic deaths are in pretty sketchy conditions - rain, snow, sleet... things that older Autopilot, especially, simply won't work in.
So, yes, a straight up comparison of the two numbers ("fatalities per million miles in Teslas with Autopilot engaged" vs "fatalities per million miles of all vehicles in all conditions") is at least somewhat deceptive.
For one thing, Autopilot is more likely to be engaged for some types of driving than others. Comparing statistics with Autopilot engaged to the total of all miles driven is comparing apples and oranges.
Similarly, it's comparing statistics about the people who buy and drive Teslas with the entire driving public. You don't know how many accidents Tesla owners would have gotten into if they were in cars that didn't have self-driving features.
Finally, you can't draw any conclusions about whether lives were saved by just looking at the number of accidents and ignoring their severity. Hypothetically, if Autopilot caused fewer accidents at low speeds but more catastrophic collisions on highways, it could be easily be causing more deaths than it prevents.
In fact most things are better done by humans, because they understand context, which most AI/ML currently doesn't.
AI is great for tasks that can be done without much context and can be incredibly efficient and fast compared to manual work. Everything else, including "self-driving" currently needs supervision or produces terrible results.