[necovek]

While spatial awareness is important during driving,I believe being focused on driving is even more so.

When driving the tight streets of old European cities with pedestrians jumping out everywhere, I usually watch for hints like too tall cars parked on the sidewalk and potentially hiding pedestrians planning to cross the street, and move my foot from the gas to hovering above the brake pedal. And a million other things like that, mostly by paying close attention to driving.

Sure, I believe my spatial awareness is also great, but that helps me to parallel park in fewer back-and-forths or to remember a way to a place I've been to once six months ago through a maze of one way streets. But it does not help me reduce the chances of an impactful collision (sure, I might ding a car on the parking lot or not because of it, but nobody is going to get hurt because of that).

You are right that cars are not safe, but for some part, you've got control of the risk yourself. I also watch for hints a car will swerve in front of me, and I am sure I've helped avoid 100s of traffic accidents by being focused on the whole driving task. And other drivers have helped avoid traffic accidents that I would have caused in probably a dozen cases too. I think I am an above average driver simply because of that ratio.

You run similar risks when you board a public bus without knowing how the driver feels that day, and how focused they generally are.

[roenxi]

> You are right that cars are not safe, but for some part, you've got control of the risk yourself.

I don't want to be in control of the risk, I'm a bad driver. Haven't owned a car for some years. Still drive on occasion when I need to with a hire car.

I want a computer that is better at driving than I am to do it. It is easy for me to see why perfect is the enemy of good on this issue.

You don't want to share a road with me when you could share it with a Tesla FSD.

[nmeofthestate]

>You don't want to share a road with me when you could share it with a Tesla FSD.

This might be irrational, but I'd rather be killed by a human than killed by a computer made by a company that's run by a gung-ho serial bullshitter. That would somehow suck worse.

[jjav]

> You don't want to share a road with me when you could share it with a Tesla FSD.

I'd rather share a road with you, a human.

Even if you're a self-admitted bad driver, humans have a strong instinct of self preservation which helps.

Software has no such thing, a bug in the code will let it accelerate full throttle into a wall (or whatever) without flinching because it's not alive.

[icebraining]

Bugs in humans let them do that too: "The US NHTSA estimates 16,000 accidents per year in USA, when drivers intend to apply the brake but mistakenly apply the accelerator."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration

[bartvk]

Or: look-but-failed-to-see-errors, which are an "interesting" cause of accidents. When I took my motorcycle driver's test, my driving instructor sometimes warned me that I needed to make movements in a particular way. He claimed that even though I would make eye contact with a car driver, they may look-but-not-see-me. His reasoning was, as a motorcycle rider, I'm horizontal/upright when a car driver may be looking for something vertical (another car).

[necovek]

Riding a motorcycle is a tough one for car drivers, and not just because of the issue you mention: bikes can accelerate and brake much more rapidly due to their lower mass, and inattentive drivers can easily be caught by that. Them appearing where it shouldn't be possible for a car to show up also amplifies the issue (you don't need to look over your shoulders in a single lane street, but bikes easily show up there).

To be honest, I'd trust software even less if I was a bike rider riding in a European (or Chinese, Phillipine...) city, but that's just me :)

[Marsymars]

> bikes can accelerate and brake much more rapidly due to their lower mass

Cars are typically able to brake faster than motorcycles. One of the reasons why tailgating on a bike is extremely dangerous.

[necovek]

Being a software engineer,I do want to share a road with you more than any self-driving tech out there today.

You need to experience truly bad roads to understand the complexity involved that you would easily navigate and software would be perplexed!

Sure, we need to be building it today to get there some day, but we are so far away!

[kaba0]

There is no need for FSD, just a simpler AI/sensors that detects collision and breaks before the driver does (which is already a feature in some cars)

[BingoAhoy]

You mention focused driving, but here's a cool idea. Your subconscious which actually handles most of ur behavior and decision making and nuanced calculations gradually learns from your conscious. When you focus on things, you gradually train your subconscious to mirror that behavior and do it autonomously.

This is demonstrable by reflecting on new things you learn versus old things. Old things like walking you barely put any conscious effort in, yet once you reach a certain age the daily obstacle course that is life, which is full of tripping hazards becomes effortless to avoid ensnaring ur foot on and succumbing to a sudden tumble. But if you were to try to roller blade for the first time, suddenly you have to put massive conscious strain and focus on every movement just to avoid falling on something so simple as a slight texture change on a surface.

Also interesting thought on (conscious) spatial awareness: Here's a question is your conscious aware of things first or is your subconscious aware first? When you conscious becomes aware how sure are yah that it's not your subconscious first alerting your conscious beforehand? These are rhetorical questions which psychologists and neuroscientists already have insights about :).

Life is dangerous, but many of the dangers are predictable and the brain is adept growing to adjust to that predictability AND at learning to recognize indicators for unpredictable dangers(humans receive anxiety in these moments). In those latter situations Intelligence and consciousness is needed. Dangers that are predictable can be learned to be subconsciously handled without much worry & with much practice + experience.

Tesla autopilot is a computerized subconscious that's consciously trained by all the tesla drivers.

I strongly suspect that we'll never have level 5 autopilot with or without lidar sensors unless the computers get a human adaptable intelligence module OR some convention simplifies the environment such that new unpredictable dangers can be minimized to a miniscule and acceptable failure rate. I think people in this debate are focusing on the wrong issues.

[necovek]

You say how we subconsciously handle things like obstacles during walking, but here I am at my 38 years of age, tripping on uneven sidewalk where there's a sudden unnoticeable drop in the level of a couple cm (an inch): the same feeling when you go down the stairs in dark, and forget that there is one extra step.

I agree we get subconsciously trained (here, my brain is expecting a perfectly flat sidewalk), but when I say focused driving, I am mostly thinking of *not-doing-anything-else*: to an extemt that I also keep my phone calls short (or reject them) even with the bluetooth handsfree system built into my car with steering wheel commands.

The thing is that a truck's trunk opening in front of you and things starting to fall out on a highway at 130kmph (~80mph) is very hard to train for, but all four of us car drivers that were right behind when it happened did manage to avoid it without much drama or risk to themselves or each other. What self driving tech today would you trust to achieve the same today? Sometimes you don't care about averages, because they are skewed by drunks or stupid people showing off on public roads.

And stats being by miles covered is generally useless: if it was accidents per number-of-performed-manouvres, it'd be useful. Getting on an empty highway and doing 100 miles is pretty simple compared to doing 2 miles in a congested city centre.