[Volundr]

> 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.

[ajross]

> I've yet to be convinced we are anywhere close to meeting the bar on that if.

What would convince you? Data from 60k cars isn't sufficient?

[Volundr]

> 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.

[olliej]

The Tesla data shows that they are less safe than regular drivers

[ajross]

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.