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Comment by seles | Hacker News Reader

Alerting driver of potential pedestrian = good

Automatically making a decision (that the human is better at making) and potentially causing an accident due to a random sudden stop = bad

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Are you saying it's worse to potentially cause an accident due to the sudden stop than to certainly have an accident as you run someone/thing over? I'm not sure I agree with you there.

Especially considering the difference in injury for a rear-end accident versus mowing down a pedestrian. Even if we assume that 100% of the time the car behind you will hit, the death toll is still likely much reduced.

This line of argument hinges on the assumption that braking input is the only means by which to avoid an accident. Cars have steering wheels and swerving is often an effective maneuver when attempting to avoid an accident.

Incidentally, heavy breaking reduces a car's ability to corner which may end up causing accidents which could otherwise be avoided.

At below 22mph or whatever they said, and at the distances they show in the movie, I'm almost positive that braking is the correct action. In that situation, stop distance is short and it's too late to swerve. (It's true that swerving becomes a progressively better option as speed increases.)

This would be "certainly" only if the system worked perfectly. I think there will way more false positives than actual preventions (at least in the near term).

> Automatically making a decision (that the human is better at making)

What about when the car really is better at making that decision? IMHO, we are few scarce decades away from cars that will just be plain better drivers than the median meatbag.

We need some empirical data on this - run tests, get results, interpret them, etc. Until then, it's all a bunch of pointless what-ifs - "But what if I'm being carjacked and I need to get away, BUT Adolf Hitler is blocking my way, BUT ALSO he's carrying the baby Einstein, BUT ALSO it's actually evil Einstein!"

> IMHO, we are few scarce decades away from cars that will just be plain better drivers than the median meatbag.

...except that we've been a few scarce decades away from this for a few decades now. For the most part the history of this thought process is that we dramatically underestimate the problems involved.

One could argue that the same arguments in the aviation industry are simply playing out now in the automotive industry. What you'll probably end up with is a Boeing and an Airbus: some manufacturers will trust the driver more than the computer, and some will trust the computer more than the driver.

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