If safety is your #1 goal, you should be advocating for busses and trains. Those are infinitely safer than cars, self-driving or otherwise.
[edit] Transit is 10x safer than private cars. [1]
> The effects extend beyond individual trip choices, too: the report notes that transit-oriented communities are five times safer than auto-oriented communities. Better public transportation contributes to more compact development, which in turn reduces auto-miles traveled and produces safer speeds in those areas. On a national scale, too, the U.S. could make large advances in safety if each American committed to replacing as few as three car trips per month with transit trips.
Busses and trains are safer than cars, but certainly not infinitely so. Nonetheless the infrastructure we have isn't built for them, and that won't change any time soon. If you want a suburban house with a yard, you need a passenger car. If you want to pick blackberries at the local farm, you need a passenger car. Making passenger cars safer through autonomy is clearly a good thing.
By all means, advocate for more transit friendly urban centers. I'm with you. Just don't take away autonomy out of spite. Better cars are still better, even if they're not the solution you want.
> Making passenger cars safer through autonomy is clearly a good thing.
I'd actually disagree with this stance. Making passenger cars safer through autonomy is probably a good thing if we can actually make it safer than human drivers. I've yet to be convinced we are anywhere close to meeting the bar on that if. I assume we will eventually, but I'm not even sure I'll live to see it.
It also ignores potential knock on effects, sure in isolation safer cars are better, but the reality is nothing exists in isolation. Could we save more lives if instead of spending the money we are on self-driving cars we instead invested it into our transit systems?
As an example of knock on effects, affordable cars feels like an easy win right? Makes travel easier for everyone. But by and large affordable cars are what has allowed suburbs to exist, but there's an argument to be made that urban sprawl is far from ideal and that we'd be better of with denser communities and public transit.
> What would convince you? Data from 60k cars isn't sufficient?
It would be if the data showed they were safer than human drivers, and was independently obtained. I have yet to see any data that suggests this or anything close to this.
Uh... no? I suspect you're referring to the Goodall preprint that did the rounds a few days ago. What it purported[1] to show was not that AP was less safe than regular driver, but that it was less safe than Tesla claimed. It still showed that it was (moderately) safer than Teslas being driven without active safety measures, which are themselves about 3x safer than average vehicle.
You seem to have taken the opposite conclusion, which is exactly what the feeding frenzy over the paper wanted.
[1] The methodology is hugely suspect: you can't take an incomplete data set and then just "correct" it by inventing axes that you pull in from other incomplete data sets that weren't studied or measured in the original! That's rank P-Hacking. It seems reasonable, but I guarantee that a talented statistician can push any such data set 2x in either direction with that kind of trick.
It's not a question of taking away autonomy, and there's certainly no spite about it. If you want to get around town, you have bikes or e-bikes. If you want to get out of urban centers, you can always rent a car at the periphery.
I've lived in SF for 10 years with no car and have never felt unable to do anything I've wanted at any time.
> If you want to pick blackberries at the local farm, you need a passenger car.
Not really, the farm can have a bus with regularly scheduled pick-ups or routes like a lot of the Napa wineries do.
You seem to be ignoring the last and most crucial point:
> If they want to test it out on public roads, run the analysis and look at whenever it diverges from the drivers decisionmaking instead.
It would be trivial to analyze the data after the fact to see where the AI model diverges from the human driver’s actions, decide which one was right, then implement the correct action. That wouldn’t slow down testing at all, as the only difference is who’s controlling the vehicle. In any beta test, someone still has to analyze the data.
How about we measure and see if FSD is killing people at all first? It's not an unanswerable problem, after all. There are 60k+ of these devices on the roads now. If the statistics say it's unsafe, pull it and shut the program down.
Do they? If they don't, would you admit that it's probably a good thing to let it continue?
Exactly. Let's measure. Is that rate higher than seen by median cars in the environment? I'd argue no, given how distressingly common that kind of incident is (certainly it's happened to me a bunch of times). But I'm willing to see data.
I think where you're going here is toward an assertion that "any failure at all is unacceptable". And that seems innumerate to me. Cars fail. We're trying to replace a system here that is already fatally (literally!) flawed. The bar is very low.
>I think where you're going here is toward an assertion that "any failure at all is unacceptable". We're trying to replace a system here that is already fatally (literally!) flawed. The bar is very low.
Failure is not the issue when it comes to Tesla FSD, accountability is.
For any mistakes human drivers makes, they have to pay up with money, have their license suspended, or with jail time, depending on the severity of their mistake.
You fuck up, you pay the price. That's the contract under which human drivers are allowed on the road. Humans drivers are indeed flawed, but with our law and justice systems, we have accountability to keep those who break the law in check, while allowing freedom for those who respect it. It's one of the pillars of any civilized society.
In my country, running a stop sign or a red light means you get your license suspended for a while. When a self driving Tesla does the same mistake, why doesn't Tesla's FSD AI have its "license" suspended as well? That's the issue.
What's the trolley problem have to do with this situation?
Are there accidents where death is unavoidable? Yes, they happen every single day, but after the investigations and trials are over, the parties found responsible pay up for those deaths in either money or jail-time, or both.
Does that mean we should we allow machines to make deadly mistakes, especially when death IS avoidable? Absolutely not. We sentence humans for such mistakes. Machines (either their operator or their manufacturer) should also have the same liability.
Those are two different things which you're trying to spin into a strawman.
Let's say you are on an overpass above a train, and a very fat man is in front of you. The train, if it isn't stopped, will kill 10 people on the tracks. But, if you push the person in front of the train, it will kill 11 people, and one of those would be you committing homocide.
Even if it means that a loved one of yours would get run down by one of these, it's ok in the end, because it helped improve some billionaire's beta tech-demo?
FSD isn’t a monolith, where speeding up one company gets us to the goal faster. We don’t even know if it’s possible with current tech, let alone with just cameras. Slowing down tesla might be just making a dead end safer. We don’t know, which is why we need safety standards.
Exactly! I expect to see nothing but negativity here regarding this.
Making intelligence out of silicon isn't easy. Let the computers learn this way during the transition period, and finally we can remove human drivers from the road.
More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S. roadways. And Tesla makes the safest cars:
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the main independent organization that conducts crash tests on vehicles in the US, released the result of its latest tests on the Tesla Model Y and confirmed that it achieved the highest possible safety rating.
>The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the main independent organization that conducts crash tests on vehicles in the US, released the result of its latest tests on the Tesla Model Y and confirmed that it achieved the highest possible safety rating.
That doesn't mean that Telsa makes the safest cars. There are roughly ~100 cars with that rating, and nothing suggests the Model Y is safer than any of the others. It's also important to note that that rating isn't based of real world data such as how often drivers actually crash and hurt other (ex, how often FSD fails), but rather how well the occupant is protected in the event of a crash.
[edit] Transit is 10x safer than private cars. [1]
> The effects extend beyond individual trip choices, too: the report notes that transit-oriented communities are five times safer than auto-oriented communities. Better public transportation contributes to more compact development, which in turn reduces auto-miles traveled and produces safer speeds in those areas. On a national scale, too, the U.S. could make large advances in safety if each American committed to replacing as few as three car trips per month with transit trips.
[1] https://mobilitylab.org/2016/09/08/transit-10-times-safer-dr...