[spacehome]

Currently we're losing a million lives a year (about a 9/11 per day) to auto accidents. I think there's a serious argument that it's ethical to push autonomous driving onto the road before they're safer than humans if that would help them debug the software faster and advance to superhuman safety levels even a day sooner.

[stevesimmons]

So you're volunteering to be an unpredictable pedestrian or cyclist around large numbers of early-stage driverless cars? Put your ethics into practice!

The rationale response for individual cities is to say: "Do your risky testing elsewhere, thank you very much. You may come back here once you are as safe as our average driver."

[spacehome]

I'm already a pedestrian surrounded by unsafe human drivers, and every day I hate what I see. What I'm talking about is making a tradeoff between risk now and risk later such that my total risk is lower. I'd take that tradeoff, and I think it's the ethical thing for society to do. What you're talking about is NIMBY, which certainly makes sense locally -- better for some other locale to perfect the technology -- but on the societal level I think it's wrongheaded. But don't worry; there's no danger anybody will take my stance on it seriously. Autonomous vehicles will not be widely deployed until they're provably drastically better than humans.

[05]

The rational response is to try passing legislation that prevents companies like Uber from (ever?) testing on public roads while allowing responsible companies like Cruise and Waymo a way to prove their competence and be allowed to test/operate.

[mozumder]

Why would you want to increase the death rate by pushing more autonomous vehicles onto the road?

[spacehome]

Because doing so will cause issues (like this one) to be found and fixed faster. When enough bugs are fixed that the autonomous drivers are safer than the meatbag drivers, then the death rate will start to decrease. The argument is that you can trade more deaths today for a sooner decrease later. Under certain assumptions, you'll save net lives.

[Slartie]

You need to have SERIOUS evidence for the claim that autonomous driving will actually be safer than human driving one day to even attempt to make this argument of yours. "Faith in technology" is not "evidence"!

If your faith is strong enough, you'll surely be welcome if you sign away all of your rights and serve as irrational traffic participant in a city where self-driving cars are tested. You could run through the city all day and produce difficult safety-critical situations by suddenly walking in front of them.

My faith isn't strong enough for doing that, so I expect lawmakers to protect me from companies like Uber who apparently think it's okay to basically make me their guinea pig in their public experiments. But I'll applaud you if you decide to take the risk on yourself for the (potential, unproven) advancement of the human race!

[spacehome]

I'm already doing it all day for human drivers to no benefit at all.

I am pretty convinced that computers have the potential to outperform humans in this, but I'm not really interested in hashing out the debate here; the arguments have all been made more elegantly elsewhere. Though I don't know why you keep ascribing 'faith' to me. I never brought that dirty word up. I reasoned my way into my positions.

[Slartie]

> Though I don't know why you keep ascribing 'faith' to me. I never brought that dirty word up. I reasoned my way into my positions.

In that case, what do you base your assumption on that self-driving cars will be able to deal with the complexities of todays' traffic in a significantly safer way than humans? Because even though you might not bring that word up, if you just assume that to be the case because you expect technology will one day be able to make that wish come true, that IS "faith" in technology. Whether you like that word or not doesn't matter.

[davidgould]

This argument assumes that autonomous drivers will be safer than human drivers. Which is an unproven proposition. It is possible that autonomous driving may never be safer, or that the rate of improvement may be much slower than expected. How many "more deaths today" do you think are reasonable to test this question? One? ten? one thousand? ten thousand?

[spacehome]

Yea, it does assume that. I happen to think that's true, but it's a separate argument, and one worth having. Humans are really quite bad at driving, so I think a conservative estimate is that autonomous vehicles could cut road deaths by at least 90%.

Cars are killing by the millions now, so do the math, and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of deaths in the process, contingent on the deaths actually helping researchers and engineers reduce future faults. I would happily take a million deaths right now if it meant driverless tech instantly became available to everyone, but I think there's an upper limit to how many accidents can be realistically examined at once.

What's the alternative position? That you're for more road deaths in total? Are you also the kind of person who wouldn't pull the lever in the trolley problem?

[davidgould]

> I'm willing to tolerate a lot of deaths in the process, contingent on the deaths actually helping researchers and engineers reduce future faults. I would happily take a million deaths right now if it meant driverless tech instantly became available to everyone

For the sake of the discussion, let us assume that this is hyperbole and that "happily" was an infelicitous word choice. That said it raises a few questions:

- Uber and the other companies presumably are developing this technology for their own private benefit and do not plan to make it "available to everyone". In which case, how many deaths are acceptable?

- Should they be successful and succeed in developing a safe autonomous driving system should they be compelled to make it "available to everyone"?

- Are these million doomed citizens volunteers with informed consent or are they to be struck down unawares at random?

- What if the technology proves more difficult to develop than you anticipate? Suppose that after one million are sacrificed for the greater good it is improved but not yet good enough. Should we then continue with another million or should we abandon the project after only one million fruitless deaths?

- Assuming success, should we then ban human driven vehicles completely?

[edited for formating]

[Slartie]

> What's the alternative position?

Developing and testing the technology in actual test scenarios (build entire testing cities and fill them up with paid stuntmen and -women, if necessary) instead of in public, until you're able to prove that the tech is statistically at least as safe as human drivers. After that, you can continue testing in public, provided that you deal with any changes to your system responsibly and ensure that the public is not exposed to additional danger because of your testing.

This is actually very common in the software development world. For production-critical systems, companies go to great length of creating a staging environment as realistically as possible, but fully separated from the production systems. You may get around that effort if the only damage you can potentially do is people not being able to see stupid cat pictures on a social network. But sorry, for life-critical tech, the move-fast-and-break-things approach is irresponsible bullshit.

> I would happily take a million deaths right now if it meant driverless tech instantly became available to everyone

What if your own death is guaranteed to be among them? Still "happily taking" it?

[spacehome]

Guaranteed, no. But I'd take a 1 million divided by 7 billion chance. It's roughly my odds of dying this year in an auto accident anyways.

[jamesgeck0]

Why is the FDA so strict about human trials? We could save net lives if we just did drug tests faster to figure out what works. /s

[spacehome]

You jest, but the comparison is that we do drug tests at all, which we of course do. It's the same calculus. The math works out more in favor of being more aggressive in our pursuit of driverless vehicles as they kill more prime-age, otherwise healthy people.

[tmd83]

It's slightly different though. Even if FDA was lax, the participants would be volunteers. This victim though didn't have any say in joining Uber's trial.