[emodendroket]

> People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.

But computers can't do it better than people! That's what drives me nuts about this debate -- it's just accepted as a premise that either the self-driving cars are much safer than human drivers, or the path to getting them there is very close and no serious obstacles remain. Neither is true and it's not clear they will be. https://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-...

[baddox]

I think what is clear is that virtually no one is okay with large-scale public deployment of self-driving cars that aren’t clearly statistically safer than human drivers, so when we’re talking about public deployment of self-driving cars, it’s implied that we’re talking about when (if) they reach that level of safety.

[emodendroket]

Frankly, that's not clear to me. A lot of people seem quite eager to put the first vaguely plausible thing all over the road because of an exaggerated idea of the incompetence of human drivers (which is understandable, but harmful in this context)

[philwelch]

The question is, which human drivers?

Let's say we have a self-driving car that is as safe as the 20th percentile human driver. Do we allow that self-driving car on the roads? Do we selectively revoke licenses from 1 out of every 5 drivers and replace them with a car that's at least as safe as they are if not probably safer? Do we replace breathalyzer interlocks for drivers with DUI convictions with an AI driver and just revoke their licenses permanently?

There isn't a trivial solution to this problem. At some point, some AI driver is going to cause an accident that would not have been caused by a 95th percentile human driver. At the same time, human drivers do shit like this all the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oidHSzukSss

[emodendroket]

OK, nice anecdote, but if you follow my link you can see that if we just blindly take the average of all drivers and accidents per mile driven and then compare it to AI performance AI is nowhere near average, let alone the 95th percentile. Here is another example of what I'm complaining about: an argument that simply takes as its premise something not yet proven to be true.

[philwelch]

Like what, “self-driving AI will never improve past the state of the art in mid-2018 so it’s useless to speculate about it ever doing so”?

[emodendroket]

It's not entirely clear it will in the foreseeable future improve to the point where it is a serious prospect to be safer than human drivers.

[darpa_escapee]

To me, this seems like an a priori assumption that accepted as the truth. Then, when it's questioned, the person questioning is made out to be some kind of luddite.

Which is an odd phenomenon to me. I can't even get Google Assistant to understand me 3/4 of the time, yet I'm supposed to take it on faith that autonomous cars are inhumanly safe?

[emodendroket]

Google Assistant is a funny example, because my wife has a foreign name and I can do absolutely nothing to get it to understand when I ask to call her, even attempting to imitate its weird pronunciation of the name. The only thing that works is hand-typing "Xxxx is my wife" into the Assistant and then referring to her exclusively as "my wife," and that gets reset with updates periodically

[Piskvorrr]

Questioning the capacity of Friend Computer is treason here on HN, Citizen! Report yourself for immediate termination.

In other words, much of the autonomous robot debate here is based on handwaving, wishful thinking and No True Autonomous Scotsman (...would run over a human).

[mavhc]

No, require data to be public, require a billion km simulated driving test for every software version that's released to a car without a safety driver.