[rifung]

> Lives at stake don't change anything here. The question is whether self-driving cars, even with the errors, are safer for people than regular drivers on average. If so, then absolutely yes everyone should bet their lives and their families'.

Maybe logically that makes sense but from an ethical perspective I argue it's much more complicated than that (e.g. the trolley problem)

In the current system if a human is at fault, they take the blame for the accident. If we decide to move to self driving cars that we know are far from perfect but statistically better than humans, who do we blame when an accident inevitably happens? Do we blame the manufacturer even though their system is operating within the limits they've advertised?

Or do we just say well, it's better than it used to be and it's no one's fault? When the systems become significantly better than humans, I can see this perhaps being a reasonable argument, but if it's just slightly better, I'm not sure people will be convinced.

[craftinator]

I'm voting for the "less dead people" option. Mostly because I'm a selfish person, been in automobile accidents caused by lapsing human attention, and I want it to be less likely that I'll die in a car crash.

[cameronbrown]

But it's not just about quantity. It's also _different_ people who will die. That radically alters things from an ethical perspective.

[notahacker]

Yep. Medical professionals have been aware of this dilemma for millennia: many people die from an ailment if no treatment is attempted, but bad approaches to treatment can kill people that would have survived otherwise. And setting 'better average accident rates' as the threshold for self driving vehicle software developers to be immune from the consequence of their errors is like setting 'better than witch doctors' as the threshold for making doctors immune from claims of malpractice.

Move fast, break different things, is not the answer.

[JoeAltmaier]

What if its very much better average accident rates? This isn't black-and-white.

[notahacker]

No, it certainly isn't black and white. Indeed 'much better' is hard to even define when human drivers cover an enormous amount of miles per accident, miles driven are heterogenous in terms of risk, there isn't even necessarily a universally accepted classification of accident severity or whether drivers should be excluded from the sample as being 'at fault' to an unacceptable degree. Plus the AV software isn't staying the same forever: every release introduces new potential edge case bugs, and any new edge case bug which produces a fatality every hundred million miles makes that software release more lethal than human drivers, even if it's better at not denting cars whilst parking and always observes speed limits in between. I don't think every new release is getting a enough billion miles of driving with safety drivers to reassure there's no statistically significant risk of new edge case bugs though.

And in context, we still punish surgeons for causing fatalities through gross negligence even though overall they are many orders of magnitude better at performing surgery than the average human.

[JoeAltmaier]

Sophistry. 'Much better' can be very clear, in terms of death or injury, or property damage, or insurance claims, or half a dozen reasonable measures.

Sure it takes miles to determine what's better. Once automated driving is happening in millions (instead of hundreds) of cars on the road, it will take only days to measure.

[erobbins]

I vote for that option as well.

So far, I have been killed exactly zero times in car crashes. All the empirical evidence tells me that there's no need to surrender control to a computer.

If I die in a crash, perhaps I'll change my mind...

[strbean]

Do we gain something from placing blame? Who do we blame for people who die from natural disasters? Freak occurrences?

Are deaths where blame can be placed preferable to deaths where it cannot? By what factor? Should we try to exchange one of the latter for two of the former?