[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.

[buvanshak]

>Money absolutely matters. If there's no money, there's no development. And vice versa.

Both are not true. It does not need money for a man to have a great breakthrough idea. It is also not possible to guarantee generation a great idea by just throwing more and more money at researchers...

[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.