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Comment by xvxvx | Hacker News Reader

We continue to inch closer to these dumb buckets costing someone their life. Hell, they may already have.

Human driven cars cost people their lives multiple times every day, though. So I don't think the calculation can be quite as simple as that. As self driving cars are rolled out I think each incident like this needs to be studied to see how avoidable it was, whether a human would have been able to resolve it, and what changes can be made.

There are always going to be fuck ups at some level. The question is whether we’re moving from a world of more fuckups to fewer or not.

"Multiple" being stretched to the absolute limit in this comment.

The argument that as long as they cause less incidents than human drivers they are a win has to go. Because that only works if the statistics of the environment are stationary.

What does “statistics of the environment” mean in this context? How can fewer deaths on the road not be a win?

I think they're getting at something like this: If self-driving cars resulted in dramatically more miles-traveled-in-car per person they could be safer per-mile and more efficient per-mile while making some important total outcomes worse.

Relevant to this example: if people travel by car more because they care less about traffic when they're playing video games or on TikTok during it, instead of driving, overall congestion will likely go up which makes emergency services worse.

That’s fair but I think it’s kind of orthogonal to the original point.

As is already the case in cities with robust public transit systems you’d need to make sure you’re applying the right incentives (i.e. taxes and charges) to make sure people are making decisions that benefit everyone. That doesn’t alter the possibility of self driving cars being much safer than human driven ones.

But in the case of self driving cars, who do we find at fault? Have we even answered that question? I mean did the Waymo car even get a ticket for blocking the ambulance?

Has any human driver ever received such a summons?

If you are to believe Waymo’s safety stats, they have less accidents/injuries per mile driven.

But whether or not reducing injuries at a statistical level outweighs the downside of autonomous vehicles causing accidents (even at lower rates) is a bit of a dilemma.

I think the style of incidents and circumstances are probably neglected. But, even if they're not, I think there's other reasons we notice waymo issues more. Akin to how nuclear and airplane travel are safer than coal and car travel. This might be true, but when something does go well in those aforementioned fields, we notice.

The human side of those stats, whenever I've seen them presented next to self-driving car stats, has always been an aggregate of all human driving, a vast amount of which is in environments or conditions that Waymo doesn't operate in.

Shh stop speaking sense to blind technologists.

The road to mass adoption of autonomous vehicles probably wont happen in any poster's lifetime on this board. The reality is most people on here are quite narrow minded and can't 'understand' why it is not as easy as "hey I found a stat that shows Waymo is safer than humans!!11!".

It's the reverse. Every Waymo on the road saves more lives. The average driver is a bufoon

No, we’re finding edge cases that come up once every like million miles these things are putting on the road. Which means they are pretty damn good given how many are on the road right now.

These "edge cases" were required knowledge to get a license in my home country. You make room for any emergency vehicles, you don't try to score an ultra kill when passing a school bus and you certainly don't drive on rail tracks.

I’ve seen pictures in Germany where cars will move to the side of the expressway during a traffic jam to make room for emergency vehicles. I could tell that wasn’t the USA for sure.

They do move aside, just not in this particular case.

The 'smart' buckets kill about 40K a year, so there's that. No point in abandoning this

Now there will be a single company to sue instead of lots of individuals. If you want to be rich, start a law firm that focuses on autonomous vehicle accidents, like all the truck crash firms out there.

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