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Comment by librasteve | Hacker News Reader

Approx. 30-35% of the world’s population live in countries that drive on the left side of the road.

About 76-78 countries and territories drive on the left side of the road.

Many of these countries are former British colonies, particularly in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

Notable countries that drive on the left include the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, India, South Africa, and New Zealand.

Only four European countries drive on the left, all of which are islands: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Malta, and Cyprus.

[NB: the above from perplexity.ai ... not listed but notable in my opinion are Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Apparently used to be the case in Myanmar but they also did a Napoleonic military junta that hates the Brits switch in the 70s]

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> Notable countries that drive on the left include China...

Only Hong Kong and Macao drive on the left, mainland China drives on the right.

Which also throws the population statistics if I am not mistaken.

The statistics are right, if both China and India drove on the left it would be more like a 50:50 global split. And right-hand-drive (i.e. left-hand traffic) EVs would be a lot easier to come by.

If Japan were interested in making EVs (more than they already are), it would solve that problem well enough. BYD is making right hand drive EVs for the Australian market at least.

I mean, you obviously can get them, they just often come out substantially behind the LHD models, and some of the other (many) manufacturers may not ever provide them. Which, to be fair, has been a problem in ICE cars too.

For example, it's not clear if the Xiaomi SU7 is planned to have a RHD variant.

Oh - I have only been to Hong Kong. Actually I manually added China to the list and left the total 30-35% alone which stat I got from the perplexity.ai (I assumed it was a hallucination). I have edited the comment back tot he original. Thanks for the clarification.

One does wonder, if an AI is so untrustworthy that you pre-emptively hypercorrect(1) its output because you assume it's hallucinating, what the point is of using it to write an authoritative-sounding comment in the first place.

(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

Artificial Intelligence meets Human Stupidity (frankly I am too lazy to manually fact check the definitive list of RHD countries for the purpose of a simple HN post - but I do want to get across that 30-35% of humanity is not just the UK - so I reached for the LLM and ended up thinking (hmmm - I have been to HK and they were driving on the left) and (hmmm - looks like the AI forgot China which it probably doesn't realise is a "notable" country) - so I put China in the list, was furthermore too lazy to redo the math so stuck with 30-35% since that was the "safe" choice). I submit that the real damage was done by using an "authoritative-sounding" set of words to present my seat of the pants guestimate and for this I stand corrected.

So, I'm fascinated, what's the motive for leaving these comments which are just a (frequently questionably correct) summary from an LLM? Like, if people want to ask a stochastic parrot, they can presumably ask one themselves; commenting with the output of one seems like a weird behaviour.

I felt that the prior comments were very focused on Britain (and, as a counterpoint, our European neighbours who drive on the right) and that there is a global aspect to the topic which would be appreciated by the global HN audience. Therefore I thought it would be beneficial to the discussion to bring in that a largish fraction of the world population lives in countries that drive on the left. Since I didn't know what that fraction is and I myself was curious to learn it, I used a popular AI search utility to find the information. When I had gathered the information I thought it was relevant to the topic and informative and that the best way to share it was to copy it into the post text field.

I'm not sure that my answer is that fascinating, but I believe that my motive was well intentioned and that the method was not unreasonable. In hindsight I should have cited my source so that others did not take an "authoritative-sounding" piece of text as gospel and that my role had been selection and a cursory edit.

Funnily enough I have been quite resistant to LLMs, but I am finding that they are a much better way to do research on the web than Google. I also believe that the reason many folks think that LLM is a step towards AGI is that humans are also stochastic parrots. Whereas parrots are not.

Please don't post slop here. I come here for human comments not confidently incorrect LLM output.

Edit: Also the United Kingdom is not an island, it's a union of nations across multiple land masses. Great Britain is an island.

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