Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

Re:Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock by the8472 on Thursday July 05, 2018 @07:06PM (#17467632)

Of course if people make more journeys, i.e. become more mobile, you could argue that the increased number of deaths should be balanced against life-hours of drivers freed up while also improving quality of life of passengers at the same time, i.e. it might still be QALY-neutral or even positive.

> than the average sober, careful and experienced human driver

But ultimately we do accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)

The total distance driven also does not just depend on technology alone but on urban planning. AVs may change that dramatically over time.

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Re:Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock by notahacker on Thursday July 05, 2018 @07:52PM (#17467868)

True, there are QALY arguments for even unreliable SDVs (and also for other things like abolishing speed limits or allowing people to continue to operate older vehicles currently deemed unroadworthy if they can't afford better), but they're dependent on how you adjust for quality and at best orthogonal to standard safety arguments.

> But ultimately we do accept the fatility rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)

We don't accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers; we confiscate the licenses of or jail bad drivers on a regular basis, and we certainly don't permit drivers being taught to operate commercially. Driver accountability for accidents is part of the social contract that permits individual transportation despite its cost; an corollary of that is that the accident rate is higher than we believe it should be, and that some degree of negligence is involved in the current level of accidents which it would seem unreasonable to exonerate corporations from if they were to replicate them using software. And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.

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Re:Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock by the8472 on Thursday July 05, 2018 @08:45PM (#17468100)

> And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.

Uber could be skewing statistics in similar ways.

Anyway, this is all handwavy speculation. What I'm trying to get at is that the overton window for AV behavior may be surprisingly large, especially if they exhibit their worst behavior in the learning years when the fleets are still small. For some metrics possibly even larger than that for humans.

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