[apsec112]

"I'd rather it be human error."

Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's more than the entire population of San Francisco. Think about that. Nine hundred thousand people. Nine hundred thousand corpses. If technology can prevent that, I'd say we have a moral duty to not only develop it, but to do so as fast as possible, before too many more people die early, violent deaths.

[avdempsey]

Brad Templeton (EFF board member and prolific robocar blogger) calls this the "humans hate being killed by robots" effect.

If you're into robocars you can do a lot worse than checking out his robocar page: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

[ebbv]

As I stated to the reply above yours; we're not talking about replacing all cars on the road with automated cars overnight. We're talking about selling automated cars alongside regular cars. So your argument doesn't really hold water.

Yes if we had an automated car ready to replace everyone's normal car, we'd start saving tons of lives tomorrow and I'd be a monster for opposing it. But that's not reality, that's not what we're talking about.

And what I'm saying is, I'm uncomfortable and see problems ahead. And I seem to be totally alone in this, which is amazing to me.

[stephenhuey]

You're not alone, but the reality is that the automated cars might react to the human drivers much more quickly than the other way around.

[ebbv]

I am sure that the automated drivers will react faster, but the problem is that they can only react to events they have been programmed to react to and only in the ways they have been programmed to react.

There's no ensuring either of:

a) It will react to everything that it needs to react to / not react to things that it shouldn't.

b) It will react in the proper way when it does react.

This is the problem.

Like I said if it were all automated drivers on the road, I think we'd have a really amazing safety record. But the problem is that with human drivers and automated drivers on the road, the human drivers are going to do all kinds of stupid shit, and how much of it will be reacted to properly? I don't know.

It seems to me most people on HN significantly underestimate the complexity of solving this problem of automated drivers alongside human ones.

Plus, I am also uncomfortable with training human drivers to just trust the computer and pay no attention to what's going on around them. I think that's the worst outcome of automated drivers.

[dylangs1030]

The problem with your thinking is that you assume the engineer's behind this can't program a response to every conceivable condition. I'd argue they can.

If you have a 3-dimensional model, with a finite number of axes to move upon, any movement towards the vehicle from another vehicle, no matter what it is, can be enumerated and mathematically modeled.

Once that has been done, it is a matter of programming the autonomous car's probabilistic response to the oncoming collision.

You think that most people significantly underestimate the complexity of solving this problem - I'd argue that, no, figuring out how to maintain satellites in orbit is more difficult than modeling every possible 3-dimension interaction between two, four, or 20 different cars.

No matter what kind of "stupid shit" human drivers do, there's only so much "stupid shit" they can actually perform. It can all be modeled mathematically on a 3-dimensional plane, and thus programmed for.

Is it a complex problem? Yes, assuredly. But your comments are approaching it with what seems to be mild hysteria - it's a basic engineering problem, and all you need to do is model it out. The math is there. It's solid. And I trust math more than I trust human drivers.

[stephenhuey]

Exactly, and and if the total number of crashes decreases by one or two orders of magnitude, then the outlier incidents that the automated cars couldn't correctly respond to might be a tiny number, so low that it pales in comparison to the number of mistakes made by human drivers.