[coldpie]

I'm a proponent of self-driving cars, but I do really struggle with this. Nefarious governments are one concern, but my larger concern is the complete joke that is computer security in 2016. For the most part this means the worst case is people lose some private data; bad news, certainly. But car companies have already proven they can't handle security, and now we're building Internet functionality into cars. What happens if some sociopath like Auernheimer decides to kill a few people for laughs?

[icebraining]

Will they kill more than 16000 per year? Because that's how many it would take to make it worse than today, even assuming that self-driving cars only halve the current numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

[Kadin]

I agree with you, but I have confidence that those security issues can be resolved -- by just removing the network connections, cellular backhauls, etc. if necessary -- while the alternative represented by the status quo has basically ceased improving.

We've spent decades with passive, and more recently active, safety improvements, and the results have been good ... but in the last few years the rate of improvement in fatalites-per-mile has tapered off. It seems that all the low-hanging fruit is basically gone from that particular tree, and we may well be pushing into a zone where cars are perceived to be safe enough that further safety improvements might lead, perversely, to less safe behavior (the "football helmet" problem). At the very least, making modern manually-controlled vehicles significantly more safe seems like a very serious challenge.

On the contrary, we know that autonomous vehicles can be much more safe than manually-controlled vehicles, just by virtue of not being run by a person who may be drunk, high, emotionally impaired, tired, distracted, medically incapable of driving, etc. Right there you remove a bunch of leading causes of crashes. Given our failure to eliminate those problems completely (we made some progress on drunk driving, sure, but not much on the others, IMO) given decades of effort, we should consider that building secure computer systems might be a more tractable problem.

It will take a lot of effort to ensure that the car manufacturers don't do obviously boneheaded things (like allow over-the-air software updates), but I have more faith in our ability to quickly fix machines than to change human behavior.