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Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

I have killed statistically 0 humans with a motor vehicle of any kind. I am a very precise bag of mostly water that has a vast corpus of knowledge on how to correctly operate a motor vehicle in any weather and traffic conditions and I can also problem solve my way out of novel situations. Additionally I can accurately model the road surface, weather conditions, current traffic pattern, and account for pedestrians without any significant mental or physical exertion on my part. IF you or others you know cannot say the same then yes, they should certainly surrender their license and find other modes of transportation. When driving AI has been produced that can provably outperform me in the rain, in ice and snow, and on the track, I'll consider stepping aside. That day hasn't arrived and isn't likely to any time soon.

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You may be great. Others -should- turn in their license. But clearly this approach has failed, as a million dead people every year can testify to.

You're right, replacement day has not arrived yet. (Especially not by tesla). But it is coming. And I suspect this generation of drivers wont consider stepping aside, much less actually doing so.

But my kids didn't have the same desire to drive that I did. For them it wasn't a big deal, there were alternatives (like uber). They did learn, but only pretty much cause they had to. My grandkids probably won't learn. My great grand kids certainly won't. No more than I can ride a horse.

I hear you. I'm not great, just a product of my generation. I was expected to be able to operate literally anything with wheels and most things with treads by the time I was 18, that's pretty normal for folks growing up rural in the 80s. I'm not trying to fight the tide here, the point I'm trying to underline (and that we appear to agree on) is that the tech simply is not on a level where replacement of human operators is sanely viable.

One day Mavrick, your kind will be extinct. We don't need drivers who make mistakes, need to rest, make bad judgement calls, have no patience or consideration.

Sure, it's not today, butvyhe day is coming. Its not far away now (on human time lines, not necessarily tech time lines).

Until then, enjoy the ride ;)

That's just it. A career in software engineering has lead me to believe that that day may never come, that the industry will, as it so often does, strike upon exactly the right focus-group tested line of bullshit to drive mass adoption without ever hitting the technical requirements that would make that ethical. If the day does come I'll nap my ass for a lap around the country on one truly epic road trip. I just hope the driver is smart enough to not park directly under a street light while I'm trying to sleep.

> We don't need drivers who make mistakes, need to rest, make bad judgement calls, have no patience or consideration.

But eliminating human drivers isn't just eliminating that. It's also eliminating humans who are not tired, who are making good judgment calls, and who do have the patience and consideration to drive responsibly. Unless you are claiming there are no such humans anywhere, which is ridiculous (the majority of human drivers meet the requirements the majority of the time).

For self-driving technology to be truly viable, in other words, it's not enough for it to outperform humans who are tired and impaired. It has to outperform humans at their best. Otherwise the humans who aren't tired and impaired will have no good reason to use it, and will have an ironclad objection to being forced to.

You stated that much more articulately than I was able to and I thank you for it.

> When driving AI has been produced that can provably outperform me in the rain, in ice and snow, and on the track, I'll consider stepping aside. That day hasn't arrived and isn't likely to any time soon.

This is a different argument from the one in the article. You are arguing that you will outperform the AI and therefore should remain the driver. And you want proof to change your mind.

Both are reasonable and I agree.

The author isn't demanding proof that it is statistically better before switching. They object to giving up control and view that as a moral imperative, "no matter how “safe” the computerized features are."

True, which doesn't invalidate the author's point. I'm merely adding a second set of considerations to the discussion. I think it's worth drilling down a little harder on the author's point though. They correctly note that there are no life-or-death systems that are wholly computerized with no human supervision. To me that speaks rather strongly to either a lack of awareness or lack of ethics on the part of drive AI advocates, as they're cheerleading something the military, aerospace, and medical industries have rejected on merit.

Most industries don't have a million deaths a year as incentive.

For most industries zero deaths is the norm, so clearly computers have to be at least that good. Frankly we're so collectively bad at driving that we'd be an order of magnitude better if the computers only killed 100 000 a year.

In over 100 years of driving humans have, at best, gotten worse. We continue to kill despite cars being better and safer.

On the other hand 100 years of improvement to self-driving cars will (I predict) drop those deaths to under 1000.

How have we gotten worse? Deaths have plummeted.

You're attributing to operator error what is more likely caused by poor vehicle design, incomplete understanding of crash mechanics, and immature material science and manufacturing techniques. As early as the late 90s you could still buy a car that would force-feed you the steering column in a head-on collision.

I feel operator error (drunk driving, disregard of road rules, speed limits,signage, deteriorating vision) and so on are the cause of most road deaths.

Referring to the effects after a collision, and not the cause of the collision itself, is valid, but secondary.

Even the majority of people who are so called bad drivers have killed zero people, and no one is going to call themselves a bad driver, fewer are going to admit an AI is better at them (even if it's statistically true).

Do you have a statistic to show this last part? The only stats I have seen are with self-drive in "clean" areas versus a stat from "everywhere". Most self-driving cars don't run in bad areas of Detroit or Bombay but people driven stats count these areas too.

I was speaking somewhat hypothetically, as for now I would agree that it's tenuous at best to call self driving cars safer. My point was more that even if they were provably safer, people would have ego problems in claiming they are more dangerous than self driving cars.

All very true and valid points. I, for one, am willing to put my money where my mouth is. If there comes a time where a general purpose driving AI can consistently outperform my track times and not drop the plot in weird suburban situations I'll gleefully take the back seat and catch a nap while the car drives.

This is classic “I’m special”ism and it’s all an illusion. You are human, you make mistakes, you get tired, you overestimate your capabilities and your reaction times are much much slower than a computer.

There is nothing special about you that makes you more able to drive cars than anyone else and especially compared to a computer. In a few years it will considered crazy and unsafe to drive your own car and comments like this will be chuckled at.

> In a few years it will considered crazy and unsafe to drive your own car

In a few years? Surely you jest. Self-driving tech is nowhere near being able to outperform all human drivers, which is what would be required for your statement to make sense.

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