[fapjacks]

I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. But I think you're right. I think the "best" way to move forward until we have perfected the technology is not something that drives for you, but something that will completely take over the millisecond the car detects that something terrible is about to happen. People will be engaged because they have to be engaged, to drive the car. The machine can still gather all the data and ship it off to HQ to improve itself (and compare its own decisions to those of the human driver, which IMO is infinitely more valuable). But if there's one thing the average person is terrible at, it's reacting quickly to terrible situations. You're absolutely right that people can't be trusted to remain actively engaged when something else is doing the driving. Great example with the cruise control, too.

[hyperbole]

No one dies so someone 10 years from now can watch a full episode of the family guy unimpeded for the duration of their commute.

The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel - that's bs.

[pstuart]

Plenty of people die right now because they just got a text or they had no other way home from the bar, etc.

The human toll is absolutely relevant to the conversation: this is about people dying now and in the future. It seems cruel to discuss it in a "I'll sacrifice X to save Y" later, but it can reasonably be reduced to that.

I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and deaths.

[hyperbole]

It's a deceptive to assume autopilot saves lives when it too has taken them. The number of people with access to auto pilot is far fewer to statistically determine how many more center divider deaths we might have if everyone were it's passenger.

Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No.

I hope we eventually save lives as in net improvement in current death totals by using these technologies but the risks are not well communicated, the marketing is entirely out of sync with the risks and the "martyrs" we create thus to me look like victims.

[buvanshak]

> Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No.

I think beliefs such as these is fueled by the extremely naive implication that each death will cause the learning algorithm to "improve itself" so every self driving thing out there is safer owing to that death..

[hyperbole]

That's not the thrust of my point... Talking about how many people have to die to perfect autonomous vehicles is pointless, some people are willing to jump out of airplanes & they fully understand the risks.

Some number of people, N are willing to risk their lives to use autonomous vehicles they'll die as a result. It should be just as clear to person using autopilot the risks involved not misled with marketing fluff that doesn't come close to reality. Martyrs not victims

[buvanshak]

>I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and deaths.

This assumes that the self driving tech will continue to increase in competence and will at some point surpass humans. I somehow find that extremely optimistic, bordering in on being naive.

Consider something like OCR or object recognition alone, where similar tech is applied. Even with decades of research behind it, it really cannot come any where close to a human in terms of reliability. I am talking about stuff that can be trained endlessly with any sort of risk. Still it does not show an ever increasing capability.

Now, machine learning and AI is only part of the picture. The other part is the sensors. This again is not anywhere near the sensors a human is equipped with.

From what we have seen in the tech industry in recent years is that trust in a tech by the people, even intelligent ones such as people who are investing in it, is not based on logic (Theranos, uBeam etc). I think such a climate is exactly what is enabling tests such as these. But unlike others, these tests are actually putting unsuspecting lives on line. And that should not be allowed..

[rayiner]

Or speech recognition or even speech synthesis. We’ve been working on speech recognition for decades now and Siri is still nearly useless.

[pstuart]

It is optimistic. Is it naive? Only in the sense that I don't do development in that realm and I can only base my assessment on what's publicly discussed.

Please note that I artfully omitted a due date on my assumption. There's so much money involved here and so much initial traction that it is indeed reasonable to think that tech can surpass a "normal" driver.

I'm also biased against human drivers, plenty of whom should not be behind the wheel.

[buvanshak]

>There's so much money involved here and so much initial traction that it is indeed reasonable to think that tech can surpass a "normal" driver.

I don't think it is reasonable at all to reach that conclusion based on the money involved...You just can't force progress/breakthrough just by throwing money at all problem..

>I'm also biased against human drivers, plenty of whom should not be behind the wheel.

So I think it would be quite trivial to drastically increase the punishment of dangerous practices if caught. I mean, suspend license or ban for life if you are caught texting while driving or drunk driving.

[pstuart]

Money absolutely matters. If there's no money, there's no development. And vice versa. That funded development isn't a guarantee of success, but it raises the odds to be non-zero.

You're also ignoring a key point: we have "self-driving" cars right now, but they're not good enough yet. Computer hardware is getting cheaper day by day, and right now the limiting factor appears to be the cost of sensors.

[EGreg]

Here is the messy situation: maybe this system is better at avoiding accidents than 40% of the people 99.999% of the time.

The best thing is to build a system to analyze your driving and figure out if you are in that 40% of people and then let it drive for you. Maybe drunk drivers, for example. It can do this per ride: “oh you’re driving recklessly, do you want me to take over?”

EVERYTHING ELSE SHOULD BE A STRICT IMPROVEMENT. Taking over driving and letting people stop paying attention is not a strict improvement.

The argument should NOT be about playing with people’s lives now so im the future some people can have a better system. That’s a ridiculous argument. Instead WHY DON’T THE COMPANIES COLLABORATE ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AND RESEARCH TO ALL BUILD ON EACH OTHER’S WORK? Capitalism and “intellectual property”, that’s why. In this case, a gift economy like SCIENCE or OPEN SOURCE is far far superior at saving lives. But we are so used to profit driven businesses, it’s not likely they will take such an approach to it.

What we have instead is companies like Waymo suing Uber and Uber having deadly accidents.

And what we SHOULD have is if an incremental improvement makes things safer, every car maker should be able to adopt it. There should be open source shops for this stuff like Linux that enjoy huge defensive patent portfolios.

Ain’t gonna happen I’m afraid.

[kolpa]

> The argument should NOT be about playing with people’s lives now so im the future some people can have a better system.

Why not? That's how pioneers make progress, in new aircraft and spacecraft.

If people want to be on the bleeding edge, why not let them?

How can the cars improve if they are never allowed to drive?

[Xylakant]

Pioneers usually are people well aware that what they’re doing is risky. I doubt that the victims of the last Tesla crashes and of the latest Uber crash regarded themselves as Pioneers. They probably just wanted to safely arrive at their destination and relied on a feature marketed as being capable to bring them there.

The pioneers in this case are putting other people’s life at risk.

Wayne seems to demonstrate that improving self-driving cars without leaving a trail of bodies behind seems in the realm of possibility, so let’s measure Tesla against that standard.

[EGreg]

The cars can improve by being pieces of soft foam emulating the aerodynamics of a car while atop a metal base with wheels and an engine inside the foam. They would be fully autonomous with no human driver, avoid collisions as much as possible and yet fluffy enough to not hurt anyone even at high speeds.

[pdonis]

> while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel

They don't just say it in the legal language. The car is continually reminding the driver of it, as the article makes clear.

[osrec]

I disagree with your initial sentiment. In my opinion, we can have self driving cars without a large human toll. I just think we need to stop trying to merge self driving cars into a road system designed for human operators. Moreover, we should not be "beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators. Accidents will happen, as ML models can and do go unstable from time to time. Instead, we should look to update our roads and infrastructure to be better suited to automated cars. Till then, I hope those martyred in the name of self driving technology are not near and dear to you (even if you'd feel it's worth it).

[tedivm]

To me beta testing should be a long period of time where the computer is running while humans are driving, with deviations between what the computer would do if it had control versus what the human actually does being recorded for future training. The value add is that the computer can still be used to alert to dangerous conditions, or potentially even overriding in certain circumstances (applying break when lidar sees an obstacle at night when the human driver didn't see it).

The problem is that Uber needs self driving cars in order to make money, and Tesla firmly believes that their system is safer than human drivers by themselves (even if a few people who wouldn't have otherwise died do, others who might have died won't and they believe those numbers make it worth it).

[Splines]

It's surprising that this isn't the standard right now. I'm certain the people at Tesla/Uber/Waymo have considered this - I'm curious why this approach isn't more common.

[kolinko]

It was happening. Many companies, Tesla including, gathered a lot of data for training the system.

The problem is that you cna only learn so much without actual practice.

[turtlebits]

I'm sure it is the standard during testing. I doubt you can do this for the general population.

[kbutler]

How about all those martyred by prolonging our current manual driving system for the years band decades it will take to roll out separate infrastructure for vehicles no one owns because they can't drive them anywhere?

I think we need to keep the human driver in control, but have the computers learning through that constant, immediate feedback.

And get rid of misleading marketing and fatal user experience design errors.

[buvanshak]

>but have the computers learning through that constant, immediate feedback.

I don't know what is stopping them from simulating everything inside a computer.

Record the input from all the sensors when a car equipped sensors is driven through real roads by a human driver. Replay the sensor input, with enough random variations and let the algorithms train on it.

Continue adding to the library of sensor data by making the sensor car by driving it through more and more real life roads and in real life situations. Keep feeding the ever increasing library of sensor data to the algorithm, safely inside a computer.

[kolpa]

>I don't know what is stopping them from simulating everything inside a computer.

Obviously they've already tried that, and it doesn't work. The map is not the territory.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

[buvanshak]

Not following you here. What do you mean by "The map is not the territory."..

What I mean is that. Do not "teach" the thing in real time. Instead collect the sensor data from the cars a human is driving (and also collect the human input also), and train the thing on it, safely inside the lab.

You say, they have done it already. But I am asking if they have done it enough. And if that is so, how come the accidents such as these are possible, when the situation is pretty out of a text book in basic driving?

[osrec]

I don't think it'll take years to update our infrastructure. For example, we could embed beacons into catseyes to make it easier to know where the road boundaries are etc. Also, we could make sections of the highway available with the new infrastructure piece by piece. It is just as progressive as your suggestion, but the problem becomes a whole lot easier to solve when you target change towards infrastructure as well as the car itself.

[kbutler]

These will take a lane from regular traffic and give it to rich people who buy an expensive car.

It also will not ensure exclusion of manual vehicles, so it won't create the exclusion necessary for the predictable driving environment.

[pbhjpbhj]

In think it could work, that lane can be the same as is used for autonomous lorries (that potentially benefit everyone if they deliver cheaper goods).

[osrec]

Not really, the road would still be fully usable by a standard car.

[kbutler]

"I just think we need to stop trying to merge self driving cars into a road system designed for human operators. Moreover, we should not be "beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators."

Sounds like requiring exclusive access - I apologize if that was a misinterpretation.

If you have human and automated drivers in the same roads, the computers have to be able to cope with the vagaries of human drivers.

How can you then get away from '"beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators' if that is their deployment environment?

[AlexandrB]

> I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem.

This is the definition of a false dichotomy and it implicitly puts the onus on early adopters to risk their lives (!) in order to achieve full autonomy. Why not put the onus on the car manufacturer to invest sufficient capital to make their cars safe!? To rephrase what you said with this perspective:

> ...developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of billions of investor dollars in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem.

This seems strictly better than the formulation you provided. How nuts is it that the assumption here is that people will have to die for this technology to be perfected. Why not pour 10x or 100x the current level of investment and build entire mock towns to test these cars in - with trained drivers emulating traffic scenarios? Why put profits ahead of people?

[fapjacks]

This reply is a classic straw man (and one of the main reasons I left Facebook behind). You are making an assumption here that's wrong and I hate that I have to speak to what you've said here because you are reading words that I didn't type. I personally would not choose to put profits ahead of people. But I didn't say anything about profit. I deliberately left profit and money completely out of my post for a reason. You also seem to be suggesting that throwing money at the problem is going to magically make it perfectly safe. You are looking for guarantees and I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are no guarantees in life. "Screws fall out all the time". People are going to die in the process of developing self-driving automobile technology. People are going to die in situations that have nothing to do with self-driving automobile technology. Deaths are inevitable and I am saying that it is worth a perceived significant loss of human life to close the gap using technology so that the number of people dying on the roads every year approaches zero.

[almost_usual]

> I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem.

I generally agree with this philosophy but this is very optimistic, at least in the United States. This is a country where we can't even ban assault rifles let alone people from driving their own vehicles. You're going to see people drive their own vehicles for a very long time even if self driving technology is perfected.

[lorenzorhoades]

I think there is a key point that will result in the freedom of being able to drive being stripped long before assault rifles. Imagine if i create a private road from SF to LA and say that only self driving cars can drive on it. The vehicles on this road are all inter-connected, allowing them to travel at speeds in excess of 150+ MPH, and since the road that i've created is completely flat it still allows it to be a smooth ride. But if i allow cars who's actions can't be predicted (Car driven by a human), it then becomes impossible to safely drive at these speeds. So me, and the road owner, bans cars driven by people on my private toll road. As this becomes more prelevent, i will no longer have the want or need to drive my own car because then it takes me 6 Hours to get to LA instead of 2. All the while there no reason for me to get rid of my assault rifle, because i really enjoy firing it out the window of my self-driving car at 150MPH on the way to LA.

[CPLX]

The thing you're describing is called a train.

[lorenzorhoades]

In a train I have to physically go to the train station, park my car, walk and find which train/subway to hop on, sit next to other people on a crowded, confined space, possibly get off and get on another train going to a different destination, get off the the train and walk/ get a rental car to where i want to actually go.

Compare the above to hop in my car, drive to the freeway, turn on self-driving, turn off self-driving once i get off the freeway, find parking near where i'm going and walk in.

As a society, we've done alot more in the name of convenience.

[Dylan16807]

Are you going to having a train running every few minutes to really make the delays comparable?

And you need a fleet of rental cars so that people can actually get to their destination.

What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?

[lmm]

> Are you going to having a train running every few minutes to really make the delays comparable?

Commuter rail systems run at 2 minute headways or less. Long-distance trains mostly don't but that's largely due to excessive safety standards - for some reason we regulate trains to a much higher safety standard than cars. Even then, the higher top speeds of trains can make up for a certain amount of waiting and indirect routing. (Where I live, in London, trains are already faster than cars in the rush hour).

> What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?

When you include the land use and pollution? Cars can be cheaper for intercity distances when there's a lot of similarly-sized settlements, but within a city they waste too much space. And once you build cities for people rather than cars, cars lose a lot of their attraction for city-to-city travel as well, since you're in the same situation of having to change modes to get to your final destination.

[mschuster91]

> for some reason we regulate trains to a much higher safety standard than cars

That "some reason" is physics. According to a quick Google search, an average race car needs 400m of track length from 300 km/h to 0 km/h. A train will require something around 2500m, over 5x the distance, to brake from the same speed. Trains top out at -1.1m/s² deceleration, an ordinary car can get -10m/s² deceleration.

Part of the reason why is also that in a car, people are generally using their seatbelts - which means you can safely hit the brakes with full power. In a train, however, people will be walking around, standing, taking a dump on the loo - and no one will be using a belt. Unless you want to send people literally flying through the carriages, you can't go very much over that 1 m/s² barrier.

Because of this, you have the requirement of signalling blocks spaced in a way that a train at full speed can still come to a full stop before the next block signal. Also: a train can carry thousands of people. Have one train derail and crash into e.g. a bridge or crash with another train and you're looking with way, way, way more injuries and dead people than even a megacity could support, much less in a rural area.

[AnimalMuppet]

I'm pretty sure that the rail is more expensive... until you start paying for the gas for all the cars. Railroads kill highways on energy efficiency.

If the cars are electric, I'm less sure.

[nightski]

Not to mention cars going 150 MPH. I can't imagine the fuel expenditure for that kind of commute. Efficiency starts dropping dramatically at 55+.

[rsynnott]

I mean, if there’s the demand, sure. Lots of commuter trains run at that sort of rate.

Though your train of cars would likely have such low passenger density that a series of buses would be just as good. Special lanes just for buses are already a thing.

[almost_usual]

So you exit the self driving private road to enter a public road where there are still local residents who insist on driving their own vehicle. Some of these residents have never been to location X and have no interest in it. They care about their neighborhood and getting around however they want.

The point is driving is a freedom and getting rid of it in this country will be hard. I'd imagine self driving vehicles having more prevalence in China where the government can control what destinations you have access to and monitor your trips.

[Bizarro]

You'll see municipalities and then states banning cars starting off using soft incentive based approaches, then harder approaches once enough people switch over.

Many states (red) won't ban them for a very long time.

the impact on freedom to travel will have to be secured and decentralized without any government kill switches.

[BRAlNlAC]

You'll see municipalities and then states banning cars

Which states? Maybe a few in New England, but I don't see that happening anywhere else. Counties perhaps, but there are rural areas pretty much everywhere, and people are going to want the freedom to drive their own vehicle.

[seanmcdirmid]

Economic incentives and competition will eventually cause it to happen regardless of sentiment. First, insurance rates for manually driven cars will shoot through the roof as less risky drivers moving to self driving cars decimate that risk pool (like if gun owners were required insurance for misuse). Second, cities that go to self driving only will have a huge advantage in infrastructure utilization and costs as roads are used more efficiently (with smoother traffic) and parking lots/garages become a thing of the past. Residents will just push for it if it means not being stuck in traffic anymore. Or worse, people and companies will relocate to cities with exclusive self driving car policies, creating a huge penalty for cities that don’t or can’t do that.

In comparison, the economic impact/benefit of banning assault rifles is negligible (and definitely not transformative) even if I personally think it is the morally right thing to do. (Maybe we can make the case later if school security and active shooter drills become prohibitively expensive and/or annoying)

[almost_usual]

> Or worse, people and companies will relocate to cities with exclusive self driving car policies

So people will relocate to avoid traffic? Why doesn't this happen today? Suppose San Francisco decided to not enforce self driving laws to protect small businesses and preserve community infrastructure and culture. Now suppose Phoenix (only picked because they've been progressive with self driving technology) does enforce self driving laws, would you expect a mass exodus from San Francisco to Phoenix?

[seanmcdirmid]

Yes, people do move cities for better quality of life (e.g. their commutes suck). Companies have been known to do similar things.

Right now Phoenix is not even on the map for most of us. If they did something like this (at the right time), then it might be.

[seanmcdirmid]

Additionally, it isn't really SF vs. Phoenix. Think global competition: if developing mega cities in Asia adopts this before American cities do, they will be able to more quickly catch up with and very likely exceed their American counter parts in a short period of time economically.

[AlexandrB]

> First, insurance rates for manually driven cars will shoot through the roof as less risky drivers moving to self driving cars decimate that risk pool (like if gun owners were required insurance for misuse).

Why would the less-risky drivers move to self-driving cars first? Wouldn't some of the higher-risk demographics (e.g. the elderly) make the move first since they have more incentive to do so?

> Second, cities that go to self driving only will have a huge advantage in infrastructure utilization and costs as roads are used more efficiently (with smoother traffic) and parking lots/garages become a thing of the past. Residents will just push for it if it means not being stuck in traffic anymore.

I think self-driving cars will be really cool and reduce traffic accidents once they're perfected, but a lot of these assumptions don't make sense. Unless a critical mass switches to car-sharing, autonomous cars and no parking will make rush hour worse because now each car will make the round trip to work twice a day instead of just once. Also, what happens to the real-estate where the parking lots are now? The financially sound thing to do will probably be converting these lots to more offices/condos/malls. So urban density will increase - increasing traffic.

Even if autonomous cars radically improve traffic flow, I suspect we'll just get induced demand [1]. More people will take cars instead of public transit and urban density will increase until traffic sucks again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

[seanmcdirmid]

> Wouldn't some of the higher-risk demographics (e.g. the elderly)

Elderly aren't usually considered higher risk. The young kids are, enthusiasts are, people who drive red sports cars are.

> Unless a critical mass switches to car-sharing, autonomous cars and no parking will make rush hour worse because now each car will make the round trip to work twice a day instead of just once.

Autonomous cars should be mostly fleet vehicles (otherwise you have to park it at home).

Isn't that just like in most of the major world cities where taxis are the norm rather than the exception? It isn't weird for a taxi in Beijing to make 5-6 morning commute rounds. But even then, there are a lot of reverse commutes to consider.

> The financially sound thing to do will probably be converting these lots to more offices/condos/malls.

While density can increase, convenient affordable personal transportation also allows the opposite to occur. Parks, nice places, and niche destinations, are also possible.

Think of it this way, once traffic is mitigated, urban planning can apply more balance to eliminate uneven reverse commute problems. There will still be an incentive to not move, but movement in itself wouldn't be that expensive (only 40 kuai to get to work in Beijing ~15km, I'm sure given the negligible labor costs, autonomous cars can manage that in the states).

[stale2002]

We aren't asking that normal cars are banned.

We are asking that self driving cars be ALLOWED if the user chooses, even IF the safety is in doubt. This is because of just how extremely important this issue is.

[intended]

Its not going to happen.

Peopl I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it till eventually the tide turns on HN and elsewhere.

You will not have full autonomy unless you control the road itself.

At which point you are better off just making it mass transit.

[pbhjpbhj]

You could also, presumably, have supervision - not control the road, but control all road users. But that's equally impractical I think.

[skywhopper]

While I agree with your conclusion, the opening line strikes me as silly. Why is it "so important" to have self-driving cars? These cars that can't detect stationary objects directly in front of them are nowhere close to the self-driving pipe dream that's been around for a century. Maybe by 2118 we'll be making more progress.

[supernovae]

It won't take that long.

Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident.

Now we have cars with lane assist, smart breaking, auto pilot features and that's only in the past 5-10 years.

Of all the places where technology can save lives, its definitely in vehicles/transportation.

[buvanshak]

> Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident.

How many optical illusions do you usually see in the roads while driving, that can result in an accident?

I am not even talking about the "people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them" part.

I mean, how can you be a human being and say this? If we were "terrible at detecting objects directly in front of us", we would have been predated out of existence a long time ago..

[pbhjpbhj]

Dips aren't quite an optical illusion; nor are blind spots, or obscured vehicles (behind frame of the car or behind another vehicle), but those are all quite common and are similar to illusions (you see imperfectly).

Sometimes you'll see multiple white lines, or lanes that appear to vere off due to dirt on the road. A bit of litter looks like a person, a kid looks like they might run out.

A lot of times I find I'm searching for something and can't see it but it was in my visual field. I think this worsens with age.

[buvanshak]

> but those are all quite common and are similar to illusions

No. None of those qualify as brain being cheated.

[pbhjpbhj]

They're similar in the sense that you don't see what you need to see; in the limited locus of "ability to safely control a vehicle" I consider them similar.

[TipVFL]

Humans can only look in one direction, and only from inside the car with their view obstructed, and they're only paying attention sometimes.

Check out this article, it is easy to never see a bike you're on a collision course with. https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...

[imtringued]

We're not talking about complicated scenarios with multiple moving actors. Tesla's autopilot cannot even do something as basic as detect stationary obstacles that are directly in front of the car. It will crash into barriers even if the highway is completely devoid of other cars.

You may consider humans as bad drivers but Tesla's autopilot is even worse than that:

It can't even look in one direction!

[TipVFL]

I'm talking about the pitfalls of human perception, and the low-hanging fruit of ways that self-driving systems can potentially outperform humans.

I'm not claiming Tesla's system is currently better than a human, just that there is plenty of potential for a machine to outperform humans perceptually. As it is, Tesla's system isn't exactly the gold standard.

[buvanshak]

>Humans can only look in one direction..

Last time I checked, I could move my eyes, up and down, side to side. I could also rotate my whole head, that also up and down and side to side.

And I am a human being.

[Fins]

I am not really sure if development of SDVs is really that important, but even if it were, your proposal would only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk racing your Teslas on Tesla's private proving grounds. Somewhere in the Kalahari desert seems to be an acceptable location. The moment people "making a sacrifice" are unsuspecting customers, and eventually innocent bystanders you are veering very much into Dr. Mengele's territory.

Actually, one thing that I was curious about regarding this incident -- they say that authorities had to wait for a team of Tesla's engineers to show up to clean up burning mess of batteries. Luckily for everyone else trying to get somewhere on 101 that day, Tesla's HQ isn't too far away. What if next time one drives into a barrier it happens in a middle of Wyoming? Will the road stay closed until Tesla's engineers can hitch a ride on one of Musk's Falcons?

[kbutler]

"Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. "

And $879B in USA per year.

[Fins]

So we should kill even more people, who had never signed up to be guinea pigs, so that maybe there will be a self-driving car at some point? Which most of those dying in those crashes will not be able to afford anytime soon anyway...

[kbutler]

No, but every year we delay replacing human drivers with something much safer, we incur huge distributed costs.

It is thus very important.

[Fins]

Thnat's assuming that the replacement actually is safer, which in case of the Auto-Pilot is not the case now, and not necessarily the case ever. There is a reason Waymo isn't unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public.

[kbutler]

> "I am not really sure if development of SDVs is really that important"

For the 1.3 million people and their loved ones and to 20-50 million injured EVERY YEAR, yeah, it's really that important.

Is it ready today? No. We're in pretty violent agreement on that.

Will we get there? I don't see much reason to doubt that we will, eventually. It may require significant infrastructure changes.

It's pretty clear Waymo/Uber are pushing the envelope too hard, without adequate safeguards, but "only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk...on Tesla's private proving grounds" is probably not pushing the envelope enough.

Even Waymo is "unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public" by driving them on public roads - lots of innocent bystanders potentially at risk there.

[rightbyte]

Thats kinda Volvo Cars approuch, word by word, as one of their RnD engineers explained it to me.

[southern_cross]

IIRC, it was also Volvo who a few years back said that they would gladly take on any liability issues for their self-driving cars. Only to backtrack on that a short while later after having learned what liability laws in the U.S. actually look like, saying that they wouldn't take on such liability until the laws are changed to be more in their favor. So there's that ...

[perennate]

> because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem.

Whose lives are we sacrificing? In the case of the Uber crash in Tempe and this Tesla crash in California, the people who died did not volunteer to risk their lives to advance research in autonomous vehicles.

I highly respect individuals who choose to risk their lives to better the world or make progress, like doctors fighting disease in Africa and astronauts going to space, but at the same time, I think this must always be a choice. Otherwise we could justify forcing prisoners to try new drugs as the first stage of clinical trials. Or worse things. Which is why there are extensive vetting before approval for clinical trials is given.

I do think that, once the safety of autonomous vehicles have been proven on a number of testbeds, but before they are ready for deployment, it is justifiable to drive them on public roads. Maybe without safety drivers. But until then, careful consideration should be given to their testing.

Uber should not have been able to run autonomous vehicles with safety drivers where the safety driver could be allowed to look away from the road for several seconds while the car was moving at >30mph. The car should automatically shutoff if it is not clear whether the safety driver is paying attention. And there should be legislation that bans any company that fails to implement basic safeguards like this from testing again for at least a decade, with severe fines. Probably speeds should also be limited to ~30mph for the first few years of testing while the technology is still so immature, as it is today.

Similarly, Tesla should not be allowed to deploy their Autopilot software to consumers before they conduct studies to show that it is reasonably safe. Repeated accidents have shown that Level 1 and Level 2 autonomous vehicles, where the car drives autonomously but the driver must be ready to intervene, is a failed model unless the car actively monitors that the driver is paying attention.

Overall I think justifying the current state of things by saying that people must be sacrificed for this technology to work is ridiculous. Basic safeguards are not being used, and if we require them, maybe autonomous vehicles will take a few years longer to reach deployment, but that thousands of lives could become tens.

Edit: I read in another comment that the Tesla car at least "alarms at you when you take your hands off the wheel". In that case I think what Tesla is doing is much more reasonable. (Not Uber, though.) Although I still feel like it is going to be hard to react to dangerous situations when the system operates correctly almost all the time (even if you are paying attention and have your hands on the wheel). But I'm not sure what the correct policy should be here, because I don't fully understand why people use this in the first place (since it sounds like Autopilot doesn't save you any work).

[imtringued]

In that case tesla's autopilot is a red herring. It's not a fully autonomous system. If you're willing to sacrifice human lives then please sacrifice them on systems that actually have a chance of working. Tesla's autopilot isn't one of them, it's most likely never going to reduce the fatality rate below the skill of a sober human because it's just a simple lane keeping and cruise control assistant.

[mozumder]

People love their cars too much.

Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere.

Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can.

Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politicians that make that decision?

This is the correct solution, since the AI solution of self-driving cars isn't going to happen. Their high fatality rates are going to remain high.

[Silhouette]

Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can.

Maybe, but unless you can change the laws of nature, you can't build a mass transit system that can serve everyone full-time with reasonable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and that's just meeting the minimum requirement of getting from A to B, without getting into all the other downsides of public vs. private transportation in terms of health, privacy, security, etc.

[mozumder]

OK. Anything else you want to make up?

Let's see what that imagination can craft.

[Silhouette]

There's no need to make anything up. Mass transit systems are relatively efficient if and only if they are used on routes popular enough to replace enough private vehicles to offset their greater size and operating costs (both physical and financial). That usually means big cities, or major routes in smaller cities at busier times.

Achieving 24/7 mass transit, available with reasonable frequency for journeys over both short and long distances, would certainly require everyone to live in big cities with very high population densities. Here in the UK, we only have a handful of cities with populations of over one million today. That is the sort of scale you're talking about for that sort of transportation system to be at all viable, although an order of magnitude larger would be more practical. All of those cities have long histories and relatively inefficient layouts, which would make it quite difficult to scale them up dramatically without causing other fundamental problems with infrastructure and logistics.

So, in order to solve the problem of providing viable mass transit for everyone to replace their personal vehicles, you would first need to build, starting from scratch or at least from much smaller urban areas, perhaps 20-30 new big cities to house a few tens of millions of people.

You would then need all of those people to move to those new cities. You'd be destroying all of their former communities in the process, of course, and for about 10,000,000 of them, they'd be giving up their entire rural way of life. Also, since no-one could live in rural areas any more, your farming had better be 100% automated, along with any other infrastructure or emergency facilities you need to support your mass transit away from the big cities.

The UK is currently in the middle of a housing crisis, with an acute lack of supply caused by decades of under-investment and failure to build anywhere close to enough new homes. Today, we're lucky if we build 200,000 per year, while the typical demand is for at least 300,000, which means the problem is getting worse every year. The difference between home-owners and those who are renting or otherwise living in supported accommodation is one of the defining inequalities of our generation, with all the tensions and social problems that follow.

But sure, we could get everyone off private transportation and onto mass transit. All we'd have to do is uproot about 3/4 of our population, destroy their communities and in many cases their whole way of life, build new houses at least an order of magnitude faster than we have managed for the last several decades, achieve total automation in our out-of-city farming and other infrastructure, replace infrastructure for an entire nation that has been centuries in development... and then build all these wonderful new mass transit systems, which would still almost inevitably be worse than private transportation in several fundamental ways.

[mijamo]

Why so big though? I lived in a 25 000 people town in Sweden and did not need a car more than a few week ends per year. There was 5 bus lines for local transport, and long distance busses and trains with quite high frequency.

And that's not taking into account the fact that bicycle is a very viable way to move around in cities < 200 000 inhabitants.

I have actually never owned a car, I just rent some once in a while to go out somewhere where regular transports don't get me. I have lived in Sweden, France and Spain, in 10 cities from 25 000 to 12 million inhabitants. Never felt restricted. I actually feel much more restricted when I drive because I have to worry about parking, which is horrible in both Paris and Stockholm. Many people I know, even in rural Sweden or France, don't own a car because it is just super costly and the benefit is not worth it. It's very much a generation thing tough because my friends are mostly around 26-32 whereas nearly all the person I know over 35 owns a car, even if they don't actually have that much money and sometimes complain about it.

[Silhouette]

You've almost answered your own question, I think. Providing mass transit on popular routes at peak times is relatively easy. It's more difficult when you need to get someone from A to B that is 100 miles away, and then back again the same day. It's more difficult when you are getting someone from A to B at the start of the evening, but their shift finishes at 4am and then they need to get home again.

To provide a viable transport network, operating full-time with competitive journey times, without making a prohibitive financial loss or being environmentally unfriendly, you need a critical mass of people using each service you run. That generally means you need a high enough population density over a large enough urban area that almost all routes become "main routes" and almost all times become "busy times".

[pbhjpbhj]

You're right. But you're going to have to change the whole of society to achieve that end - from the law, through planning and building, through entertainment, shopping and all, to farming, ... the whole kaboodle.

I lived car free in a small industrial UK city, we couldn't manage that with kids (too expensive for one).

Bus seats are awful, why?, because they're made vandal resistant (and hard wearing). They're too small for a lot of people now as well. So you need to remodel buses IMO; your going to need to be hotter on vandals, so change the approach of the courts. Things bifurcate across areas of society like that: Supermarkets, houses, zoning, etc. all are designed with mass car ownership as a central tenet.

[imtringued]

This is certainly possible and I would welcome it but this is something that cannot be done overnight. It will take decades to convince politicians and more decades to upgrade the existing infrastructure.

[pdonis]

> Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can.

No, I can't. Don't presume to tell other people what they need to live their lives.

[throwaway2048]

not everyone lives (or can live) in a city.

[drharby]

The big issue is whether one is volunyeering to take the risk or enrolling someone yo assume yhe risk

[dbasedweeb]

If you’re willing to die for this, then by all means go ahead and sign up to be a dummy on a test track. If you know other people who feel the same way, sign up as a group. If you’re just talking about letting other people die so that someday, maybe we’ll have fully automated cars, that’s monstrous, especially when they’re not volunteers and don’t get to opt out!

A laudable goal doesn’t give anyone the right to kill people by taking unnecessary risks. The reason that Tesla and Uber do what they do the way they do, instead of a more conservative approach is an attempt to profit, not save lives. If you don’t have to spend lives to make progress, but choose to do so for economic experience, there’s s word for that: evil.