[ars]

> This is the first fatality collision after 130 million miles of tesla's autopilot, so it's already above that bar.

It most definitely is not above that bar! The autopilot is combined with a human operating the car.

How many accidents were avoided by the human rather than the autopilot?

I suspect a ton of accidents (i.e. the autopilot has a high error rate).

How many did the autopilot avoid that the human would not have? Probably not that many, if any.

> Additionally, 92 people are killed in fatal car accidents in the US every day. So it's not as though this is some uncommon occurrence that autonomous vehicles would be unlikely to improve.

Do the math.

I did.

0.00001% seems pretty uncommon to me. There is a lot of driving in the US, so even that low of a number is visible, but it's still a low number.

Remember every single computer must be all but perfect to reduce the error rate.

Have you ever seen a computer to be that good? At even something as simple as not crashing? Never mind driving a car.

[emitstop]

92 people per day isn't "uncommon". It might be statistically improbable, but that's not what uncommon means. It's a regular, daily occurrence for 92 real human lives every day.

[ars]

Uncommon for the computer (or human) driving the car.

You have to understand the magnitude of the perfection needed to have any hope of implementing it.

Tell me: Before you read my message, would you have assumed at a computer that is 99% perfect, or 99.9% perfect, would be better than a human?

I can tell you, that until I did the math, I thought so myself.

But 99.99999% is 10,000 better! If the computer was 99.9% perfect you would have almost 1 million fatalities per year (assuming things scale linearly, which I'm sure they wouldn't, probably most of the time driving is easy and 99.9% would still not get into an accident).

> It's a regular, daily occurrence for 92 real human lives every day.

I know. (Although you said that badly: it's not a daily occurrence for those people. But I get your emotion.)

But a computer will not solve this problem, not for a long time. We simply are not able to make a computer that is that good.

Let's see if we can make a web browser that is that good before we try to make a driving computer that good.

It also puts human drivers in a new light. I was of the camp that people are terrible, horrible drivers that kill all the time.

But actually humans are nearly perfect at driving, it's just there are so very very many people driving, so even a tiny cumulative error shows up.

[ec109685]

"How many did the autopilot avoid that the human would not have? Probably not that many, if any."

Or probably it avoided 100,000 accidents!

Unfortunately, we are both just guessing.

So please keep your math out of this.

[ars]

> Unfortunately, we are both just guessing.

Except I am not guessing. That's the point of math.

The autopilot plus a human, only did slightly better than a human alone. That means the autopilot did nothing, since slightly better is well within the range of normal for a human alone.

> So please keep your math out of this.

What a strange reply. Why keep math out of this?

Are you hoping that this will be real if you ignore all evidence to the contrary?

Right now the evidence is in: Computer assisted cars don't do anything helpful to the accident rate. This bodes poorly for self driving cars, and since the error rate they have to hit is so low, it's really not looking good.

I personally don't expect self driving cars to ever be used on regular streets. Only on computer-exclusive roads, specially marked for them.