[HN Gopher] Our Self-Driving Cars Will Save Lives, but They Will...
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Our Self-Driving Cars Will Save Lives, but They Will Kill Some of
You First
Author : sundaeofshock
Score : 19 points
Date : 2023-09-09 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mcsweeneys.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mcsweeneys.net)
| inamberclad wrote:
| I know this article is satire, but it certainly strikes a chord.
| Putting big metal robots capable of moving at highway speed in
| close proximity to squishy humans is going to cause issues. It
| might be the human's fault. It might be the vehicle's fault. It
| might be completely unrelated.
|
| However, there are industries like aviation that take these
| issues seriously. They're investigated, reported, and learned
| from. We need to do the same for autonomous vehicles if they're
| actually going to be safe. This means we need an open,
| independent body outside of industry control, like the NTSB or
| NHTSA that can produce in depth, transparent, and publicly
| available reports that manufacturers can't bury or buy away.
|
| On the other side, we, the (future) passengers need to be
| conscious of these safety issues. We need to hold companies
| accountable for fixing flaws in autonomous vehicles. Airplane
| accidents can be spectacularly big, which captivates the public.
| I'm worried that car accidents will just be too small for enough
| people to care, and therefore we will continue to have a trickle
| of fatalities in every city and we will never be free from cars.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| ~40k people die in the US from human caused car accidents every
| year (~12.9 deaths per 100,000 people, ~1.37 deaths per 100
| million miles traveled), and we're getting squeamish about the
| robot that never gets tired, drunk, or inattentive?
|
| If you want to be free from cars, build walkable and carless
| cities people can afford and want to move to. We can then
| discuss sunsetting mass automobile infra (which is very
| unlikely, although infra spending can be weighted to more
| efficient urban development, mass transit, bicycle infra, etc
| vs automobile centric systems). Until then, the need for
| autonomous vehicles is an inconvenient truth.
|
| > This means we need an open, independent body outside of
| industry control, like the NTSB or NHTSA that can produce in
| depth, transparent, and publicly available reports that
| manufacturers can't bury or buy away.
|
| Strongly agree.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > 40k people
|
| You're jumping to a quantitative comparison because that's
| simpler and more obvious, but the right way to think about it
| is qualitatively.
|
| We have over half a century of understanding of modern human
| driving patterns. We know the ceiling on the number of
| accidents/deaths that humans will cause. We know that if it
| changes, it will change slowly.
|
| AI works differently. An update to code or models wipes out
| all expectations we've learned from prior versions.
|
| In short, the entire fleet of autonomous vehicles can change
| behavior overnight with a software update and become murder
| tanks.
|
| Nothing will ever happen to all human drivers at once. Some
| small percentage will be drunk at any given time. We'll never
| all wake up with a new drunk version of ourselves at the same
| time.
|
| I don't mean to say that autonomous technology could never
| work in principal. But we know that _this_ SV in practice has
| too much hubris and too little oversight to deploy sensitive
| products responsibly, or with attention to any values above
| profit and growth.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| > > However, there are industries like aviation that take these
| issues seriously. They're investigated, reported, and learned
| from
|
| If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world
| would come to a screeching halt standstill.
|
| And besides they do it to protect the 200M plane not the
| passengers because those same souls enter in the subway or a
| mall or a stadium or a train 15 mins after they disembark from
| the 200M plane, and they could bring (or face someone with) an
| assault rifle without facing any screening or x-rays or even an
| ID check
|
| I don't like self driving cars but if the bar to plow ahead
| with deployment is aviation then we can call the end of
| technological improvement already
| SCAQTony wrote:
| Perhaps better rapid transit could be quicker and safer than
| driving in amy form. Perhaps designers should design cities
| around rapid transit rather than building rapid transit after the
| cities have been built.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| It won't, at least not in the near term:
|
| Cars are on the precipice of both becoming immensely greener
| (electric) and immensely more practical (self-driving) than the
| status-quo. The equilibrium is going to shortly at rapidly
| shift towards cars, not towards transit.
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