[slavik81]

One accident is clearly not one data point. If Uber had driven a billion miles with 0 accidents, we would safely conclude they were safer than human drivers with "0 data points".

Assuming that accidents are independent, we can model this as a Poisson point process. If the accident rate is 1 per 100M miles and Uber has driven 3M miles, the probability of there being zero accidents in that time is P{n=0} = ((λt)^n / n!) * e^(-λt), where λ=1/100M and t=3M. Doing the math, it seems that's 97.04%.

So, yes. It is possible that Uber's accident rate is 1 in 100 million. If so, this incident would fall in that remaining 3%. It's unlikely, but possible.

[Fricken]

Gil Pratt, who heads up Toyota's autonomous development initiative mentioned that we would need to drive 8.5 billion autonomous miles to be able to declare with 99% statistical certainty that autonomous vehicles are safer that human driven ones. Of course, as we are witnessing, great pains will be taken with every preventable injurious or fatal collision to ensure that sort of failure never happens again, so by the time we get to the 8 billionth mile the software and hardware will have improved considerably, rendering the early data moot.

One thing we can say about the woman killed the other day by an autonomous Uber, is that unlike the other ~40,000 killed on America's roads over the past year, her's was not in vain.

Every day that we delay the widespread deployment of this technology, it's another 100 or so people dead. Of course, the public is unlikely to see it that way. They see one death as a tragedy, but 40,000 is just a statistic, business as usual, nothing to get excited about.

[tmd83]

I don't really understand a whole of similar comments. It's as if Uber and all other autonomous driving pursuer is doing so for the betterment of life for everyone and so their laziness in making sure their tech is good enough can be excused. The car in question failed spectacularly and the response is her death was not in vain?

Uber is doing this for money, so is all the other companies even if there are some potential huge collateral benefit for the human race from that. It's definitely not the goals of the companies regardless of any PR talk. So when you gamble with people's life for money and fame you should go to jail for a long time executives or engineers alike.

The statistics are just being used to sustain corporate greed in my mind and we should not let them. Self driving cars has lots of potential to save life, so are other techs. Does't mean that all sense of responsibility and ethics goes away just because of the potential.

[Fricken]

The pharmaceutical industry tries to save lives, for money. They're driven by greed. They also have a long track record of fucking up big time and people dying because of it. Does this mean we should stop giving people medicine? Would letting people get sick and die be preferable than allowing imperfect industries with a profit motive try and save them?

[Slartie]

What is currenly being done with self-driving car testing on public roads is basically like a pharmaceutical company mixing a new experimental drug into the dishes of random people at a restaurant, which neither are compensated in any way, nor did they have a chance to decline their involvement in the test.

Such a thing would be entirely unthinkable in the pharmaceutical industry of today. So if this comparison suggests anything, it is to much more strictly regulate self-driving car development and testing!

[stevesimmons]

That's a strawman argument... These driverless car tests are more like early phase clinical trials. Clinical trials are conducted under very tight controls, using participants who have given informed consent. Drugs don't get licensed until they can prove efficacy and safety and are approved by the FDA.

The current procedures for clinical trials are the result of decades of experience, where mistakes (and yes, occasionally shortcuts driven by greed) did result in avoidable deaths of trial participants.

For an example of how the pharma industry deals with this 'safety first' versus 'stifling innovation' dilemma, read this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526936/

The inevitable result of this crash is driverless vehicle testing will get regulated more like drug trials...

[zach43]

That’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison. In the case of the pharmaceutical company, people don’t really have any other choice other than to take experimental medicine for terminal stage diseases.

On the other hand, there are widely used, cheap, and efficient alternative to self-driving cars on the roads today: human drivers, public transport, carpools, etc.

If you want to make analogies, I think the self-driving car accident is more like if an elevator company accidentally crashed an experimental high-speed elevator in a shopping mall. I think it would be grossly negligent on the part of the company to test such an unproven device on the general public, especially if people’s lives are being put in a position of risk which they did not to worry about before.

[jamesgeck0]

Maybe her death wasn't in vain, but it was definitely avoidable. If Uber rushes out half-baked driverless cars, fallout from the incidents they're responsible for will cause serious delays to widespread deployment.

Trading lives to save on R&D time would violate professional codes of ethics in literally any other industry.

[rightbyte]

Her death was in vain. These kind of fundamental scenarios can be practised with dolls or stunt men on closed test tracks not on public roads ...

If Uber needs data they could have driven manually. Obvously their obstacle tracking is bad.

[Fricken]

It wouldn't violate professional codes of ethics in a war, and we're taking wartime casualty numbers on our roads everyday.

This is the real trolly problem when it comes to the ethics of developing self driving cars.

[Lewton]

Other big players have taken great pains to ensure that it wouldn’t happen in the first place

Uber should be banned from doing AI research on public roads