Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

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> If autonomous driving saves a ton of lives then an extra 1% is well worth it

Your total scope is about 40,000 road deaths. Off the top 1/6 of those are pedestrians most often hit at night. Another 1/6 is motorcycles. A little more than 1/2 are those who are drunk or otherwise impaired. Around a 1/3 involve someone under the age of 24 and male.

People presume that driving is exceptionally dangerous. If you actually examine the data you realize it's one of the safest things we do, given the _trillions_ of miles that are driven every year in the US alone.

From this perspective, it's not at all clear that greater levels of automation are going to improve anything. From the history of introduction into airlines, it will initially make travel _less safe_ until drivers are retrained to use the new systems in a way that doesn't enhance risk. These will often be non-intuitive lessons.

If you put a human in a machine also designed by a human and use it around other humans, you will never eliminate human factors.

I don't know where you're getting 40,000 road deaths from, because:

> According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.35 million deaths worldwide in 2016. That is, one person is killed every 26 seconds on average. [1]

I also don't know what the breakdown you give has to do with. If we can save the lives of pedestrians, drunk people, and males under 24, then amazing.

Also, a quick Google search reveals that in the US:

> Deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for persons of every age from 3 through 33 (based on 2003 data).

That sounds pretty dangerous to me if it's the leading cause of death. Maybe not that dangerous per-mile, but clearly those miles add up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

> I don't know where you're getting 40,000 road deaths from, because:

US road fatalities. This is because NHTSA catalogs every one of them and the circumstances leading up to them. This product is called the FARS.

> If we can save the lives of pedestrians, drunk people, and males under 24, then amazing.

You're assuming they'll use the automation. Or you're presuming it will be forced on people. Which ignored motorcycles. Or bicycles. People use those.

> Deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for persons of every age from 3 through 33 (based on 2003 data).

I'd like to know where you got that statistic from. In the US, it is not likely to be true. Accidental self inflicted injury, a separate category, is often the most common until Heart Disease and Cancer become factors.

The reason to use the US is because it is a developed country, a wide variety of different states and road conditions, and it has a single reporting agency covering it. Presuming that automated vehicles are going to lead to major improvements outside of developed nations is a bit unfounded.

But even saving up to 40,000 lives for 1% increase in electricity demand sounds like a good deal?

Depends on how that electricity is being generated. If it's clean then it might be a good trade-off. If it's dirty then we're probably worse-off.

True. And now we contrast this with the additional pollution deaths the increased energy and resource consumption will lead to. 1.3 million people isn't very many.

Currently we're in a paradoxical situation where there are two very contrasting mantras in society: 1. We need to reduce our carbon emissions, cut down on resource consumption and move to only producing energy from renewable sources. And 2. We should have more automation, more AI, more data, more computation in general.

Both directly contradict each other, anyone who's looked into the state of batteries and renewable energy knows we simply don't have a way for both to be true. In fact, we drastically have to reduce energy consumption if we want to make that green dream work, there's no practical way as of today to store all the solar and wind energy that would be needed for it.

I was ready to go do the math and prove you wrong, but you're right!

Some random infographic I found suggests that the mortality associated with driving of all road vehicles is about 1.14 Fatalities per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled. If we say that the average driver is mostly urban and mostly arterial driving, with a health amount on highway on a per hour basis that puts at us at about 1.14 fatalities per (100,000,000 * 1 hour / 45 miles ) 2 million hours.

I tried to find other routine activities with any element of risk that were safer than that and had trouble doing so.

Airline travel is safer - but the amount of "safety stuff" done there is much more extreme, considering how there's little vehicle training, not much maintenance, and driving continues at all times and in all weather.

This isn't to say we shouldn't try to make it safer, but that we should correctly understand where the risks are.

Fatalities/VMT isn't the right stat to use to evaluate safety because injuries and deaths cluster around conflict points(intersections, crossovers to oncoming lane, offramp exits, etc.). It can be simultaneously true that most of the miles driven are safe, but also that there are danger zones which some road users are repeatedly subjected to. And when we talk about AVs being safe, we aren't saying "they'll be safer at avoiding a crash when racing", a situation where one might credibly consider using VMT. It's relatively mundane situations of making a clean left turn, stopping at stop signs, decelerating when exiting the freeway, and so forth. Those are things you encounter with higher frequency when you are making relatively shorter trips.

Self driving cars are probably safer for pedestrians as well. They can see in the dark and should have better reflexes.

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