Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ayyy 1802 days ago
Surely there will be a tipping point when human drivers are considered riskier than AI drivers. It seems far in the future, but it's probably not when you consider all of the human errors made every day.

Not that anyone cares about that, of course, because agency is preferred over outcome.

Also, it's super annoying that now I need multiple addons (bypass-paywalls-clean, ublock origin, and 'i don't care about cookies') just to browse basic blogs these days without jumping through hoops.

1 comments

This is what gets missed. Self driving cars don't need to be flawless. They just need to be some order of magnitude better than human drivers. And assistive technology is the first step towards using that automation to make driving safer.

This idea that a computer driver should never get in an accident is flawed, IMO. Sure, we don't want "computers killing people" but the very definition of an accident is an unpredictable event and we should be looking at the entire sum/statistics of the industry, not throwing up out hands at every accident. (Not saying we shouldn't learn from each one, disect it and work to do even better, we should do that also.)

And as to those that work around safety measures so they can goof off instead of driving, congrats on the Darwin award, I have zero sympathy for them. Harsh, but c'mon. And they should be charged with a crime if they do that and injure or kill someone else.

Another thing that gets missed is this: With self-driving cars every single fatal accident will be investigated, and the result of that investigation will be used to improve the software on all cars in the network.

In this way the rate at which cars kill people will decline, similar to the systematic decline in airplane deaths over the years.

So maybe it's worth initially accepting a self-driving fatality rate that is slightly above the human-driving rate?