[paxys]

Self driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That's just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.

[pibaker]

In the case of driving and flying a significant part is the passenger's agency. There are many common sense things you can do to reduce your own chance of crashing your car. Drive defensively, don't speed, don't drive drunk. There is very little a passenger in an AV or on an airplane can do to prevent things from going wrong. And it turns out we really don't like having no agency over our own travels and that's why we have such high safety requirements for airlines — but not general aviation — and now AVs.

[notahacker]

Human accidents don't get treated as "just a part of life", serious human driving errors are often considered so egregious that the person making the error picks up a driving ban or even a custodial sentence.

So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when fatal error rates can only be estimated accurately over the order of millions of miles, driverless systems are more prone to systematic error or regression bugs than the equivalent sized set of human drivers, and the cost and appeal of autonomy probably means more experienced drivers get replaced first and more journeys get taken)

[paxys]

There are over 6 million auto accidents in the US per year. How many of them make the news? I'm willing to bet that most people don't even know about pedestrian deaths that occur a few blocks away from where they live, at intersections they walk through every day. Meanwhile the same people will read about how a self driving car got into a fender bender on the other side of the country and confidently proclaim "this technology isn't safe, I'm never going to use it".

[notahacker]

Sure, autonomous vehicles are new, experimental technology so they're inherently more newsworthy, and news reports aren't a substitute for data - though in this case it's a good illustration that AI can make errors humans would be less likely to even if it is objectively better than the average driver at parking and not speeding.

This not in any way refute my argument that would also be irrational to set the safety bar for autonomous vehicles as "marginally better than humans" , given that AI failure modes are distributed completely differently from human ones, a sufficiently serious edge case bug triggered only once every hundred million miles might make the autonomous system more likely to kill you than humans[1], and for that and other reasons its almost impossible to quantify whether a particular firmware update actually is safer than the average driver (takes around >10 billion miles to approach statistical significance if you're worried about fatalities rather than only weakly-correlated scrape rates, and then you've got to wonder whether the driving conditions are well matched). Especially if we're using that statistical argument not just to license the vehicles for road use but to absolve autonomous system developers of potential criminal liability for actions taken by their software, a luxury humans that wipe out pedestrians with similar driving aberrations wouldn't get.

[1]the US had 1.38 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles in 2023, skewed significantly upwards by DUI and other egregious driving behaviour. Less than half that in other countries with different road conditions and also more in-depth driver education. Humans have a lot of car accidents, but they also drive a lot of miles.

[HDThoreaun]

Getting banned from driving is extremely rare. Most people convicted of DUI are still allowed to drive.

[quantummagic]

Maybe. But insurance rates, and the government's enforcement of laws, are based on analytics, and overcome a lot of human emotional bias.