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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I submitted this because there are a lot of good examples of how driving is not just a process of spotting objects and following lanes, but a social process of interacting with people.

I came across another example a couple of days ago. A guy was telling a story about he was out walking his two bigger dogs in the evening. Across the street, a tiny dog started barking angrily. The tiny dog got away from its owner started to cross the street, heading into traffic. So the guy with the big dogs stepped a bit into the street, waving to attract the attention of an oncoming driver who he thought might not see the small dog ready to run under the wheels.

I have no idea what a robot car might make of that, but I certainly wouldn't want to be the one who has to write the sort of social processing that determines the guy is trying to signal something, so we should stop until we figure out what the signal means.

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You get a robodog that is replaceable. If your dog gets totalled you just download it into a new body at home. You're also going to probably need robodog insurance since restoring the robodog ain't cheap /s

> so we should stop until we figure out what the signal means.

We should determine how to handle driverless cars based on their overall safety, not edge cases. If driverless cars have significantly fewer injuries/accidents/etc. per mile driven than human drivers, we should push to expand them. If they only drive better in certain areas, we should geofence them.

If they're safer than human drivers but would hit the guy with the dogs in this case, we should still allow them. The opportunity cost of the other accidents that would've occurred if self-driving cars weren't allowed very much matters. Plus the guy with the dogs shouldn't be stepping out into the street (and the guy with the small dog should be able to maintain control of a small dog).

Also, in a world of self-driving cars, the guy doesn't have to try to get somebody's attention out of fear they won't see the small dog, because self-driving cars don't have the limited visibility issues that a human does.

Safety is all edge cases. That's especially true of cars; we all know that 99% of the time we can drive with our minds on other things. Our whole transportation infrastructure is engineered toward that end. We can't just handwave away the edge cases, because that's where all the harm happens.

Your heuristic for allowing them where they're demonstrably safer is not a bad one, but too limited. Even if they become equivalent in deaths-per-mile terms (something not demonstrated, and something not currently demonstrable given how opaque and secretive these companies are), other factors matter.

And your fantasy of a world of self-driving cars is a little too fantastical to me. Are current self-driving cars better able to avoid hitting a small dog that runs out into the street? It's possible, but I would doubt it. Will they get and remain there? Again, it's possible. But it's also plausible that some manager's spreadsheet will decide that the lawsuits from owners of dead small dogs will be cheaper than better sensors for a billion self-driving cars.

> Your heuristic for allowing them where they're demonstrably safer is not a bad one, but too limited. Even if they become equivalent in deaths-per-mile terms (something not demonstrated, and something not currently demonstrable given how opaque and secretive these companies are), other factors matter.

What other factors? I think you're wrong about this - at the high level, what matters is do these cars save lives/prevent injuries overall. If you're saying that's not the only thing that matters, what is more important than that?

> Are current self-driving cars better able to avoid hitting a small dog that runs out into the street? It's possible, but I would doubt it.

The way cars are engineered, humans generally can't see a small dog directly in front of the car. Tough to be worse than that.

Remember that most of the complaints about self-driving cars are that they just stop when they don't know what to do. If them stopping too much is the problematic behavior, it's weird to me that you and other folks here are using examples where they might run someone over. It just seems like an attempt to find theoretical fault, which is easy to do.

> What other factors?

You named one, injuries. Can you really not think of more?

> humans generally can't see a small dog directly in front of the car

Sure, but they have extensive hardware and data for social cognition. So they could well see a person with a leash running after an out-of-sight dog and infer the dog. They could see a person waving at them to stop because a of a dog. They could hear the dog barking. They could have seen the dog 30 seconds ago and said, "Hey, where did that dog get to?" They could see the dogs in the park and slow down to keep a closer eye out. They could do all manner of things that are well beyond the reach of modern technology.

And I'll note you conveniently skipped over the case where car companies just skipped over worrying about the dog at all because it allowed them to "increase shareholder value".

> You named one, injuries. Can you really not think of more?

No, I can't - I said injuries and deaths. Those are the factors I think we should use to determine if these cars are legal. You said we should consider other factors, then when asked you cited one of my factors instead of other factors then asked me to give you examples of other things. If you think there are other factors to be taken into account, say what they are.

> And I'll note you conveniently skipped over the case where car companies just skipped over worrying about the dog at all because it allowed them to "increase shareholder value".

What are you talking about? The main thrust of complaints about self-driving cars is that they block traffic because they stop when they're not sure what to do. It's literally the opposite of the problem you're describing. You're just making things up and then saying complete nonsense like this.

We should decide whether self-driving cars are legal based on whether or not they make the world safer. That's my stance. Yours seems to be unserious, incoherent nonsense.

How much safer must they be 'per mile driven' to be acceptable by society?

2x, 10x, 50x, 100x?

If it's 10x or higher then it would almost certainly need to take into account edge cases like a dog owner waving down a car.

to me, an argument i haven't heard yet is human dignity.

it's tough to hold onto it (as a human) when you're being threatened and/or injured/maimed/killed by robots.

the idea of yelling at a robot and having it ignore you is pretty fucked up, especially if it's squeezing your coworker to death, or running a dog (or human) over, etc.

But they don't squeeze people to death or run over dogs (from a distance - the physics of cars unfortunately mean that some crashes are unavoidable by either human or machine).

Both Cruise and Waymo have an exceptional ability to detect collisions and brake immediately, to the point where regular users tugging on a door handle unexpectedly can immobilize a car.

"Human dignity" suffers much more when a human kills a pedestrian through sheer carelessness, or a child dies in an entirely preventable crash.

Who goes to jail when a self driving car kills someone?

How often do people go to jail when they kill pedestrians with their cars?

> it's tough to hold onto it (as a human) when you're being threatened and/or injured/maimed/killed by robots.

It's tough to hold onto human dignity if you're dead or maimed because a car hit you. If we can reduce the number of people who are dead or maimed by cars by introducing self-driving ones, why would we not do that? Why is it better to live in a world where more people are dead or maimed and humans are driving than one in which fewer people are dead or maimed and cars are self-driving?

> the idea of yelling at a robot and having it ignore you is pretty fucked up

So what about the inattentive driver looking at their phone? You yell at them, they don't hear you because they're in a car and it's loud, and they hit you and severely injure you. Is that not fucked up?

If we're rational? 1%.

We're not, so let's say more than that, but it certainly shouldn't be 10x. If you have the ability to replace a car that kills 2 people per 100,000 miles driven (not a real number, just an example) with a car that kills 1 person per 100,000 miles driven, and you don't do that, you're needlessly causing a bunch of people to die.

And in the real world where society is not perfectly rational?

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