There were over 40,000 motor vehicle deaths in 2016 in the US [1] - more than a hundred daily. While loss of human life is always a tragedy, individual fatalities are absolutely worth it if we can begin to reduce that count sooner than by proceeding with excessive caution.
It would be morally unacceptable to delay development merely to avoid a guilty conscience.
[1] http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/Fatality-estimates-Jun...
There is no reason self-driving cars can’t be tested in private. Companies can hire pedestrians to interact with the cars, and the software can go through the same certification process that buildings and vehicles currently go through.
It’s a false dichotomy to say that you can either have self driving cars or minimally safe and accountable development, but not both.
EDIT: Here is a link to a thread replying to a parent which is now auto-collapsed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620968
They can't even share what they learn with each other effectively.
Ignoring these facts is just as intellectually dishonest.
The PP was insinuating that people with leraner's permit (and, by law, an experienced driver in the passenger seat) or people who just got a license (and hence were, literally, tested) are "insufficiently tested".
The PP was responding tho the claim that letting "insufficiently tested" systems on the road with the goal of letting them improve is irresponsible.
For the response to have any merit, you need to cite accident statistics for people with learner's permits, or new drivers.
I don't think it's even a very tough argument that these are at best basically limited filters on actual driver skill. I've known people who literally went to another city for favourable conditions for their driver test. I've known of people who passed having driven not much more than a few hours in their lives.
Nowadays if you want to be the driver in the passenger seat for a learner you need to do a somewhat more difficult test and be older.
Also, I'm really not talking about this specific case but I think it's particularly relevant that in this case there was a qualified driver able to take over for the autonomous vehicle, which is actually more supervision than a 14 year old with a learner's permit has.
Are you really asserting your statements without any fact whatsoever?
The post I'm responding to, from my perspective, has a flippant attitude towards the deaths caused by human drivers.
There's definitely going to be some osmosis but I think you're pretty vastly overstating it (and including several years in which your ability to even comprehend what traffic is is going to be severely limited).
Again, why not just test them in private and hire people to be pedestrians?
And get these employees to do what exactly? You obviously can't tell them to put their lives at risk to test what happens if they walk onto a car's path, or if they ride a bike on a car's blind spot wearing dark clothes at night, or if they fall from a motorcycle in front of a car after hitting a raccoon.
The dichotomy here is that private courses are inherently orderly and the real world is inherently chaotic.
How is it not OK to have consenting people do these things but OK to have random people on the street participate in exactly the same tests?
If all you're testing are scenarios that are known to be safe for the employee in question, then what exactly are you gaining from that testing?
> How is it not OK to have consenting people do these things but OK to have random people on the street participate in exactly the same tests?
Are you seriously saying Waymo’s (for example) testing practices are worse than just testing unsafe software in public?
Anyone with half a brain would hopefully quickly realize that you don't actually need a live person to lay down on a skateboard. Heck, you can simulate a much more risky jaywalking scenario with a mannequin on a dolly than with a living person.
Waymo is deploying its fleets on public roads too, which suggests to me that they think that private course tests can only get you so far.
No, it just suggests that building and operating huge private courses that realistically emulate daily traffic situations in cities is much more expensive than just (ab)using the "real" public infrastructure paid for by tax dollars for your beta-testing needs, and that Waymo (just like Uber) takes full advantage of this chance to privatize gains and socialize losses.
https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self...
If anything, we are morally obliged to double down.
Self driving cars can also be tested in real life environments with safety drivers behind the wheel whose own driving shortcomings are unlikely to coincide with software error. This is believed from the OEM's own telemetry to have prevented several accidents with early generation Waymo (Edit: and apparently one was present in this vehicle and was unable to prevent the accident)
Of course, there's a PR benefit of taking the drivers out of the car at this stage of their development, and it appears this has taken priority...
Certainly in the long run we would want to test in the real world. The argument is whether or not we are there yet. Other commenters have made a compelling argument, again based on the statistics, that we are not there yet. Do you disagree, and if so, based on what facts?
What I did say is that with deep learning it simply is not possible to "test" in a simulated environment to any level of certainty.
You can use simulated environments with test subjects to help develop such as system (and should do so). But you will never be able to adequately test such a system in this environment.
Why? The state space of traditional robotics and engineering problems is far more constrained. So much so that you can't even compare the fields in my opinion.
Does "sufficiently tested" mean you get the end-product a year later? What if the end-product saves 10,000 lives a year? In that case what cost is morally acceptable to get there a year faster?
You can't have the certainty to make such statements without "sufficiently testing" the product.
Can you point me to where I made a statement? I only see questions.
I'd like to believe this technology will save 20000 lives per year. But today is a time for humility and reflection.
Because we have the driving records of all self-driving vehicles. Based on the evidence, their accidents per 100,000 miles driven is far superior to the average driver. The law of large numbers tells us this is highly unlikely to be the result of luck.
We do? Because one of Uber's apparent reasons for testing in Arizona rather than California (FWIW, Waymo has since moved from AZ to CA) is that there are no requirements to disclose driving/performance records, as there is in California [0].
The most we know at this point is that Uber has claimed to have driven 2+ million miles [1], which means it has a fatality rate of 50x the rate of human drivers (~1.18 per 100M miles). Yes, it's not fair to extrapolate like that, but this is just to point out that you need to cite evidence for "[self-driving vehicle] accidents per 100,000 miles driven is far superior to the average driver"
[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...
If you think rushing to market, in some self-inflicted arms race for fully autonomous vehicles is morally acceptable to you, AND human lives are lost in the process, then I find that fascinating.
> US has 1 traffic fatality per 85 million miles driven. Uber's self-driving cars have driven ~3 million miles & killed one person
> While loss of human life is always a tragedy, individual fatalities are absolutely worth it if we can begin to reduce that count sooner than by proceeding with excessive caution.
Wait, when did I agree to be a utilitarian with you? Did I vote utilitarianism into power?
if excessive caution causes more death and more suffering, why would you be for that?
For that matter, how confident are you that you truly understand the secondary and tertiary consequences of your choice enough to make a utilitarian choice?
You can bring your hypotheticals to bear all you like, but this is a serious problem.
Generally speaking, it is easier to pinpoint X thing led to Y tragedy than to quantify the tragedies that would have happened without X. It is incredibly hard to show what did not happen but "should" have. Even if you can get it straight in your own mind, good luck proving it to the world.
People are living longer and child mortality is down. We don't really celebrate that. We just complain about overpopulation and how we are destroying the environment.
When Iraq lit oil wells on fire on its way out of Kuwait, they were expected to burn for months and be a global environmental disaster. When crack teams from around the world converged and put them out far faster than expected, it was not celebrated with the same degree of fervor that it had originally been decried as a disaster.
Y2K was also predicted to be a global catastrophe. It was quietly prevented and gets remembered as "Those fools who ever thought this was a big deal!"
If self driving cars could reduce mortality compared to current rates and we were confident of that, waiting until it is perfected before releasing it means accepting ongoing deaths that don't have to happen. It's not uncommon for people to feel that new tech needs to be perfected while missing the fact that it may be a big improvement over the current status quo without being perfected.
I don't really know anything about self driving cars. I have mixed feelings about replying to your comment because I don't actually know how I feel about this particular issue. But the thought process you are putting forth is both common and not very pragmatic.
I guess a pithy rebuttal would quote some saying about the perfect being the enemy of the good. But I think that leaves out a lot of important points.
On one hand, the "just one isn't so bad" argument is rational. In terms of fatalities per mile, self driving cars already seem to be safer than humans as a class. Therefore it would be wrong of me to say that this tech does not belong on the road when I believe I should be allowed to drive.
On the other hand, you said it best. If I ever wrote code running on a machine that killed somebody I don't know how I'd continue in my career. Hell, I work at Google very far from Waymo but if one of our cars struck and killed someone I'd feel some personal responsibility.
So ... I guess it's complicated.
I agree, but there is already a lot of software in a car that can kill people in case of an error. In particular the airbag have multiple sensors and a complex heuristic to decide when the have to open, which ones, full or partial strength, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#Operation An airbag that doesn't open can kill someone. An airbag that open unnecessary can kill someone. From Wikipedia:
> From 1990 to 2000, the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration identified 175 fatalities caused by air bags. Most of these (104) have been children, while the rest were adults. About 3.3 million air bag deployments have occurred during that interval, and the agency estimates more than 6,377 lives saved and countless injuries prevented.
So, there is already a lot of programmers that have to be careful because an error can kill someone in the car (or the plane, or a medical machine, ...) I guess it's more easy to ignore the people killed by airbags because we are use to them and we imagine that they have a simple sensor (something like a light switch. So in case of a failure nobody is guilty.
With a self driving car, the first problem is that it is new and scary, and the second problem is that in an error that creates an accident we are use to blame the driver. But now we don't have anyone to blame (perhaps the programmer).
Raises the question though: will stakeholders be willing to pay the upfront financial costs to obtain the level of quality and assurance that other engineering disciplines provide? We'll see.
As long as it kills fewer people than would otherwise have died due to negligent human drivers I'd say it's already there.
At least doctors have the Hippocratic oath.
You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NOT over-react to a single accident.
From the article it's impossible to know if the cyclist was at fault, so I won't jump to conclusions, but we can't, especially as the creators of the future of autonomous vehicles talk so dissociatively about human life. Either we go out into the public roads with very high certainty that OUR software and OUR hardware won't kill someone, or we wait till we get there.
Public opinion on human driving is doing just fine with human drivers right now, so we can and should take our time to get to the future we want or risk a backlash and a guilty conscious.