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Comment by Lonestar1440 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse.

I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car.

I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.

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I definitely agree with your point here.

That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.

If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.

Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local laws—repeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].

[0] https://www.idrivesafely.com/dmv/indiana/laws/dui-and-dwi-la...

Yes, this is a difficult problem. When I do see the 1%ers changing lanes at 90mph without blinkers, or not using headlights; I long for stricter, automated enforcement. Points, then a suspended license.

But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.

I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.

We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.

Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe.

Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.

Humans can stop dead as well, which is just as unpredictable. For example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-loses...

> it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.

Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.

Now I’m just imagining endless gridlock because an AV randomly stops mid highway, and all the other AVs reasonably stop, creating waves of backup. And this happening on a fairly frequent intermittent cycle.

Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.

I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.

It is better than what most people do now: just keep driving hoping things are safe. If AVs are regularly stopping on the highway that implies there is a problem with the road design.

Why is a typical human driver at typical performance the baseline? The bad outcomes from driving come from the poor end of the performance, if the average autonomous vehicle avoids those long tail bad outcomes, some inconveniences like slow turns etc is a very worthy tradeoff.

Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...

>Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.

Yeah we agree?

The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.

Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.

yes, but wouldn't it be easier to remove the unsafe drivers? All of this AI would be really great at automatic traffic enforcement.

Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...

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