[madamelic]

The horrible truth is that if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept that crashes will occur much like they do now with humans in sole control.

There's no reason to kill autonomous driving just because gen 1 - 50 isn't perfect but is an improvement on current driving methodology.

Giving a one-line sentence of what happened disregards other variables such as, lighting conditions, where the stationary object was (Over a hill, round a sharp bend, etc.), how much stopping distance was there. A lot of Tesla hate is purposefully done from EV haters & Musk haters. No one can argue that there isn't an establishment who wants to tear down and prevent Tesla & Musk from succeeding. Teslas will catch on fire (like other cars do), Teslas will crash (like other cars do), Auto-pilot will fail (while also being overall an improvement on driving safety).

We can't assume the stationary object was 300 feet away on a straightaway in a perfect visibility conditions, we have to judge whether a human would've performed worse and whether the same cases are occurring over and over. 12 crashes over a few months is a pretty tiny fraction when there are probably more than 12 humans crashing into stationary objects every hour.

[rutthenut]

I do not agree with this argument

>> The horrible truth is that if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept that crashes will occur >>

As that '1 life' saved may be countered by a number of lives lost due to the system that might otherwise have survived.

[hnthrowaway8493]

>if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept that crashes will occur

This argument ignores the reality of driving: by being a competent, attentive, careful driver you can avoid many classes of accident. Crashes are all about fault, and as a safe driver you can avoid most at-fault accidents. You get to avoid all the self-inflicted damage of drunk/incapacitated driving, unsafe driving for weather conditions, extreme speeding / reckless driving, etc. You still have to deal with the externalities of those, but some fraction of the time you can notice and anticipate these people on the road and stay away. Not always of course, so that still leaves some number of deaths per mile, but I'd bet that threshold is way lower than the "save one life" bar. So if you're a good driver, autonomous cars at the "current death rate" safety bar would make you less safe.

What you get by ignoring this and using the current death rate as a bar is a "transfer of deaths": you take all the deaths that were the fault of the driver (driver dies due to being drunk/high, very reckless driving, etc) and transfer them to random innocent people who were not at fault.

[vmladenov]

> This argument ignores the reality of driving: by being a competent, attentive, careful driver you can avoid many classes of accident.

It’s funny you use the word reality since this is completely at odds with driving in America. You’re comparing an idealized world of competent drivers to the real world where there are basically no barriers to getting a license and everyone is on their phone behind the wheel. Unless you advocate for stricter licensing and more police enforcement against inattentive driving with equal vigor, this line of reasoning doesn’t hold.

[_jal]

>can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept

So I take it you would be fine with the nightmare version of Apple's phone scanner, continuously scanning your devices for thoughtcrime? After all, "If it saves just one child..."

Any time I hear emotional appeals that ignore the cost side of the equation, I look for a financial motive.

[Dylan16807]

Let's rephrase. If the important upsides and downsides are all represented in the number of traffic fatalities, and that number goes down, then that's good.

The problem with the Apple system is significant downsides that are completely separate from CSAM.

[a_square_peg]

“The horrible truth is that if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now”

This is not true at all and we have much higher standards than this. This is like saying if a vaccine cures Covid but manages to kill people at a rate slightly less than Covid, we should embrace it.

[schmidp]

Isn’t that exactly what we are doing? (-slightly, as we would need to define the threshold)