[parcec]

People getting killed by drunk drivers didn't volunteer for it either. It doesn't matter how you spin it, the metric that matters (there is nuance, but put bluntly) is "How many innocent lives are lost in traffic related accidents from now until [year X]?".

If, given two scenarios:

1. We develop FSD very carefully. 0 lives are lost during FSD development. Ten million lives are lost by the time that FSD sees 100% adoption.

2. We develop FSD less carefully. 100,000 lives are lost during FSD development due to suboptimal performance before it is perfected. Five million lives are lost due to human drivers by the time FSD sees 100% adoption.

Would you really choose the former option? If your ethics board refuses option 2 in favor of option 1, it is they that are mistaken.

[simion314]

> 2. We develop FSD less carefully. 100,000 lives are lost during FSD development due to suboptimal performance before it is perfected. Five million lives are lost due to human drivers by the time FSD sees 100% adoption.

How can you know the future in this case, I would not believe Tesla/Uber (the others) predictions , "trust us, let us kill 1 million people in the next 10 years but after that the number will go down to 100, trust us, we software developers are very reliable at predicting things and our mathematical skill are so great we can be sure even when we use NN that are unpredictable. And if we fail then the next startup will appear, promise the same thing and you have no choice then to give them also a check for 1 million lives to not discriminate between startups.

[Robin_Message]

The difficulty is, you don't know the 100 thousand number is lower than the 10-5 million number in advance. An estimate can be made, but humans have a not unreasonable status quo bias in case like that. Come to think of it, status quo bias on risk is the opposite of the planning fallacy.

That is, without proof the new way will be safer in future by a specific proportion, how many excess deaths can the ethics committee sign off?

(You can make a similar, better founded argument for mass train transit. It is about 10 times safer than driving per passenger mile. So, reductions in safety that moves people from car commuting to train commuting (I imagine safety is expensive and cheaper transit would be more popular) might be worth it. No-one seems to advocate them though.)

[cf498]

>People getting killed by drunk drivers didn't volunteer for it either.

Its not a numbers game. Those are likely two different sets of people. You are saving some people by calculating in, that others get killed instead. It is different to for example, using an experimental treatment option on terminal patients. That would be, saving some of the dying patients but some might die regardless. The scenario is much more similar to the trolley problems cousin the transplant problem. Having someone else, uninvolved killed to save a larger group of people.

Seeing as the automatic emergency breaks were disabled, it seems the product wasnt good enough to detect false positives and was rushed by cutting the safety measure, accepting that putting it in live traffic the car would likely kill people unrelated to the research. It was a trade off between slower development and killing people.

I dont think you will find any ethics board that will green light you killing uninvolved people to save how ever many people. Of those i can think of who did that, quite a few ended up being wanted for crimes against humanity. We have ethics boards for a reason. Without them the ends can quickly justify the means.