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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by vidarh on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @05:21AM (#17660871)
We accept that argument all the time in practice.

Seat belts kill. They occasionally strangle people.

Yet they save far more than they kill, so we not only use them, but many countries mandate their use by law knowing people will die as a result.

It is morally justified because we're not sacrificing a known subset of people to save another known subset of people that don't overlap - we're sacrificing a small random subset of people to save a larger random subset drawn from the same larger set, and so reducing the chance of harm to all, rather than transferring it.

This distinction is key, and would reject most "random murders" you might propose.

Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by Piskvorrr on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @10:41AM (#17662882)
Which is still under the assumption that there's some orders-of-magnitude-safer-AI-driving-paradise. With seatbelts, we know how many people are saved by them vs. killed by them. With AI driving, we are merely guessing.
Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by vidarh on Thursday August 02, 2018 @11:01AM (#17671962)
It doesn't need to be "some orders-of-magnitude-safer-AI-driving-paradise". If it improves on human driving by 10%, it'd still save thousands of lives a year.
Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by darpa_escapee on Thursday August 02, 2018 @07:05PM (#17676176)
This is still very generous, given that we're many orders of magnitude away from even being close to being as safe as human drivers when it comes to autonomous driving.

Coming from a crowd that is probably intimately familiar with the limitations of Google Assistant's ability to understand the English language, I feel like we're being overly optimistic here.

I don't doubt that eventually we will be able to create safe autonomous vehicles, in the same way that eventually we will be able to treat cancers much more effectively than we do today.

However, I find it odd that posters are not applying same level of optimism to other fields, nor applying the same level of skepticism to this field that they would apply to something like cancer research. Especially given that a breakthrough in cancer treatment could effectively save tens of millions of lives annually, versus the one million lives that could be saved if we completely eliminated automotive deaths. Which, again, is a moonshot given that autonomous processes in other industries still have an annual death toll.