Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence?
Because that statement rings true for both, lol.
That's the real risk with self-driving systems. Bugs are sporadic. But design limitations create the risk that you could have mass-accident events if everyone on the road runs into the same edge case at the same time.
> Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence?
> Because that statement rings true for both, lol.
Your stated position gives far too much credit to algorithms and far too little to what every capable human driver can do.
Far worse can happen, when it gets hacked.
The data available challenges this contention. According to here[0], one estimate is that there are approximately 18,000,000 people driving at any given time in the U.S. And according to here[1], there were 34,439 traffic fatalities in the U.S. for the calendar year of 2016.
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that of the 18 million drivers in the U.S. on the road at any given time, there are at least two other drivers which are not on the road at that same time. Further, let's assume these are all of the U.S. drivers for the entire 2016 calendar year.
This would put the estimated set of unique drivers at 54,000,000. A conservative estimate by any means.
This makes the estimated probability of a human driver being involved in a traffic fatality for the 2016 calendar year to be 34439 : 54000000, or 0.00063776.
According to here[2], the probability of being struck by lightning in the U.S. is approximately 1 : 280000, or 0.00000357.
While the former is mathematically 200x more probable, the latter is statistically insignificant.
> Capable human drivers as a subset of human drivers.
Hence my qualification of "capable", included in order to obviate edge condition "whataboutism."
> At least an av cant get drunk.
But it can get defective updates, be unable to identify unknown conditions, suffer from misidentification of threats, and susceptible to cascading failures affecting all autonomous vehicles in the same situations.
0 - https://www.quora.com/How-many-drivers-are-on-the-road-at-an...
1 - https://safer-america.com/car-accident-statistics/#US
2 - http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/probability.html
this should at least get you in the right direction, but you'll likely want to put motorbikes into their class at some point.
anyway short story long you want the cumulative chance of getting killed, basing the estimate on the average person lifetime miles, which varies widely anyway one person to another making a synthetic number over such variability unfit for any purpose
Okay, let's go through what you identify as being wrong point-by-point.
> first you don't need to normalize by r ruining vehicles, both metrics are yearly.
I provided the (active/daily) running vehicles metric in order to establish a (very) conservative estimation of 54m distinct human drivers in calendar year 2016. This was to ensure subsequent analysis was reasonably well founded by way of using common base units.
> second the real signal is death per mile driven, now that's something you should look for, not abstract drivers.
Perhaps that signal is significant for other premises, but mine was to provide a probability of any given human driver causing or being involved in a vehicular fatality. This was to ensure that the derived probability was reasonably correct based on referenced data.
> third using drivers as base assume all cars vehicles have no passenger.
Perhaps my use of the descriptor "driver" was improper for the entirety of the analysis. Given the limitations of the medium, it was a trade-off I was willing to make.
Your point is correct and, yes, it would affect the probability iff the intent was to determine driver liability.
> this should at least get you in the right direction, but you'll likely want to put motorbikes into their class at some point.
> anyway short story long you want the cumulative chance of getting killed, basing the estimate on the average person lifetime miles, which varies widely anyway one person to another making a synthetic number over such variability unfit for any purpose
Your analysis is keen and one which is goes beyond what I was trying to illustrate to the GP. To wit, the specific point being addressed by my terse analysis was:
> U give far to much credit to human drivers.
So I'm not sure that accidents per mile is necessarily the best metric either.
True, that estimation may be peak load. Which is why I kept the total estimate of distinct drivers at 54m instead of the much more likely number of well above[0] that.
0 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...
Secondly, you didn't actually provide a comparison. You simply remarked "Oh the chances of dying in a car accident is comparable to the chances of dying due to lightening therefor cars are safe" (whilst ignoring the 2 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE difference between them, people struck by lightening != people killed by lightening and the fact that cars are not safe, as anyone who has ever driven will tell you).
I provided data and analysis therein. You provided an emotional attack, and a vulgar one at that.
If you have data which supports your premise of:
U give far to much credit to human drivers.
Here in Australia, with a population of 25 Million there where 1,140 road deaths in 2018.
The USA with it's 327 million population had some 40,000 road deaths on 2018.
I find it hard to imagine the av will end up doing any worse a job driving than the humans currently on the road.
And since, even with the occasional bug, the av would be doing a better job of it, that means they will end up saving lives (and lots of them).
Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again, or be punished if alcohol was involved. With an AV, currently nobody knows. It could be as simple as "we've checked in the bugfix to prevent this from happening again" with no emotion behind it.
The reality is lots of people die on the road and the numbers show this sad fact.
Now the reality is some of those who are killed, die from no fault of their own. They die at the hands of the other driver.
The sooner we can take away that human element from driving the better, because that one act will end up saving lots of lives.
> Humans who cause accidents will have remorse and learn never to do it again
That is so untrue, at least for what happens here in Australia.
Here in Australia we have many hundreds in not thousands of repeat drink driving, speeding offenders on the roads, and short of locking them up there is no way to keep them off the roads.
Taking away their license makes no difference as they just drive without a license.
That's way fewer
The argument in this thread seems to suggest we should be slow at adopting av technology because it could kill some innocent people.
Now I accept that point as a fact. There is no doubt people will die in av cars just like people die in cars today.
Yet, on the other we have human drivers killing innocent people today, which is acceptable collateral damage, even though introducing av technology would help to greatly reduce that number.
Speaking for no one other than myself, vehicular deaths are not "acceptable collateral damage" so much as a statistical inevitability, one sought to be minimized as much as possible.
The problem with introducing autonomous vehicle technology, again IMHO, is the assumption that it "would help to greatly reduce that number."
This is not a known result.
And without actually doing the implementation that question will never get answered.
But logic suggests they would help only because, with the exceptions of bugs in the system, the av:
. would not drive drunk
. would not speed
. would not run red lights
. would not get tired
. has better reaction times than humans
. has better eyesight than humans
. is not distracted by mobile phones, passengers or pretty girls/guys walking on the foot path
. is not susceptible to road rage
. etc etc.
> And without actually doing the implementation that question will never get answered.
Exactly. Which is why it is imperative the engineering community does not assume outcomes beforehand.
Much of the concerns you list I agree are likely benefits, with the "not drive drunk", "not get tired", and "not susceptible to road rage" items being a near certainty due to eliminating biological aspects.
What autonomous vehicles might not be better at could be:
. snow
. black ice
. mud
. severe thunderstorms
. able to operate in high dust environments
. adapting to rapid unexpected operating conditions
. when to run a red light (emergencies, external threats, some combination of conditions above)
Are these edge conditions? Maybe. Or you could call them functional requirements not often discussed.
All I'm saying is that there is a lot more to general-purpose driving than what can be shown in a limited setting.
IOW, show me an autonomous vehicle which can complete the Paris-Dakar Rally[0] and I'll show you someone who will say it's time for people to stop driving ;-).
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakar_Rally
EDIT: formatting
> with the exceptions of bugs in the system
Being a software developer I have no doubt there will be bugs in these av software system.
But these systems will also include many fail safe overrides designed to minimize the impact of these occasional bugs.
That's BS. You can answer these questions with rigorous research (or a slow rollout).
You can't possibly think that drunk drivers and those driving without a license are the target market for self-driving cars.
You are correct, I don't think that.
That group just represents a small subset of the drivers that present a danger on the roads today.
Now since you asked, I would say the real target market for self-driving cars is big business.
They are the ones pushing hard for this technology, not for the safety aspects that I have focused on, but instead for the cost savings this technology will bring to their bottom line.
Easy to turn that around. Only individual humans learn from their mistakes - and even then, not always. But with AI, the whole fleet learns that lesson.
Yes, of course we want this to be a numbers game. What else would you have this discussion be about? Irrational feelings?
I mean, yes, it is fine for AVs to have an occasional bug --- as long as that occasional bug kills only kills one person per 100 million miles driven. But that's actually a pretty high bar.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...
Now if instead the road deaths stay the same or go up, then naturally that should should also spell the death of av technology.
The participants are in it for the profit, not for saving lives. The US health care misery is a prime example of what happens when you try to solve a situation through the market, which by definition has to treat human lives as an externality: People in the US die earlier than in any other first world country.
The causes of death might not be the healthcare system ,no? What if the majority of these deaths are caused by bad diets and stress? Would you blame the healthcare system for it?
You're right, one can't isolate one institution for topics as complex as these. I'm pretty sure it plays a role, though, as (ignoring fundamental differences in poverty rates, workplace regulations etc.) many countries employ the healthcare system to inform the population about healthy eating and offer incentives and free courses for coping with stress. Thats the beauty of a single payer system: Beyond ethics, the healthcare system has an intrinsic interest to prevent the preventable, as that is almost universally cheaper than bearing the cost of circulatory disorders later.
There is no data to suggest that this will happen. Furthermore, if self-driving cars do take off, they will continue to be outnumbered by normal cars for a very long time. It's not even clear that they will or should be the majority.
Humans making a reckless mistake while driving go to jail.
Are those that advocate the promise of this tech willing to say "Reckless commits and reckless code reviews send engineers to jail"?
We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to find and fix bugs is to implement the thing in production and see what happens. As you point out, it exposes problems that testing and design just can't.
I see people here obsessing over how much will change if we had fleets of AVs. Maybe shaving five years off the wait time is worth N number of human lives. Especially if N < the number of lives will ultimately be saved if the technology is perfected years earlier.
Of course I wouldn't want myself or my loved ones to make that sacrifice. I don't want to die in a regular car accident either. Given the upside, speeding up AV development may be worth the risk?
This would set the incentives straight at least.
For every demand they make of OTHER PEOPLE to improve the safety of travel, they are not willing to do even /10 of that.
Not if you wish to win the hearts and minds of the general population at large. As grandparent points out, the coverage seems disproportionate, but that's because it interest people, and they are generally sceptical of letting computers drive their cars.
While technically unrelated, the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS scandal hasn't done much good either for the further automation of transport systems.
People dying at the 'hands' of AVs will lead to pushback from the general population, and political points can be scored by siding with this view, leading to tigther regulation if not an outright ban some places on AVs.
The real question is; will either the slow and thorough approach or the quick and dirty approach roll out larger AV fleets faster than the other? In any case, it'll probably be decades, before there are significant AV fleets.
But the car was such a valuable and exciting technological leap that people just lived with the risks.
It'll be the same here too, if the technology is valuable and life changing.
Meanwhile 1.25 million people die in human caused car accidents every year and somewhere around an additional 30 million are injured. But that’s “just the world we live in.” Or that’s “your choice to take a risk when you choose to drive a car.” Or whatever.
A lot of criticism of our industry is well-deserved if overly broadly applied. Most companies do not operate with the total lack of ethics that Uber and Facebook do. But they are so big and so well-known, they’ve come to symbolize a culture of amorality, deception, manipulation, and a willingness to do anything for growth and fresh injections of VC funding.
What would be really useful for everyone is to throw out that narrative for a while and focus on the task at hand. Self-driving cars will be regulated. There’s no getting around that. And tech companies could help themselves out a lot by accepting that and coming to the table with regulators with an actual plan instead of whining about having their innovation stifled.
There is a reasonable compromise. You can’t start by saying the error rate must be at zero. That will never get anywhere and people will keep dying a million a year. Where is the right number and what does it measure? I don’t know. It should probably be tiered by population density and average driving conditions and weighted by number of annual deaths in that city/region.
Highways are an easier problem to solve than, say, Manhattan. But highway deaths are more likely to be fatal. So the standards ought to apply differently.
The challenge here is really to get regulators to think a little bit like problem solvers rather than enforcers for a change. To get them to realize that “regulate self driving cars” is a problem so big and mushy that it’s pretty much meaningless. But “establish safety standard for interstate travel for autonomous trucks” is something you can work with. Maybe it’s 100x as a safe as a human driver in that scenario. I don’t really know.
Tech companies could probably turn on a lot of positive PR if they promoted milestones for certain communities. Maybe even offered incentives for cities to improve road markings. Like if Waymo said, “We want to target Brooklyn, and our goal is 10x as safe as human drivers in Brooklyn with an additional target of 1000x fewer cycling accidents. But we need you to mark the bike lanes better and put them between the parked cars and the curbs where it’s feasible, and here’s a pile of money you can use to do it.” That would generate a lot of good will, positive pr, and maybe even genuine enthusiasm that they can use to open up that market for their taxis ahead of schedule.
The car companies will get a lot better treatment from regulators if they chunk the problem into small pieces and go to the negotiating table without a victim chip on their shoulder.
There was a nice video of a Tesla driving at low speed constantly pulling the car towards green islands between lanes as if it had a death wish.
Uber famously killed someone while testing and then blamed the humans.
It remains to be seen how Waymo will fare, although having the advertising company that's spying on everyone build self-driving cars seems like parody.
Using Tesla's very clearly level-2 system, or Uber's rubber-bands-and-coathangers science project, to criticize Waymo isn't particularly fair either.
If we set up the goalposts fairly, Waymo wouldn't be anywhere near receiving permissions for full autonomy until we had statistically significant evidence the latest build could reduce fatalities to human levels which are in the region of 1 per 100 million miles (a rate which includes all the people who aren't allowed on the road...). When they've only driven a few million miles, the fatal error rate - including potentially fatal collisions avoided by safety drivers - really should be zero.
We haven't got any evidence that fatal errors in AV technology approaches that level of rarity, will never have it for individual builds, and the best [limited] evidence we've got refuses to reject the null that despite being shielded from hard AI problems like left turns and supported by safety drivers and driven at low speeds, AVs are an order of magnitude more deathly than human-driven cars...
An AV company should only be able to update the car software after that software has correctly driven for X million miles.
Perhaps a separate agency should perform the actual updating (installing of the new software), so we can be certain that no "quick fixes" are happening behind the scenes.
When we use automatic vehicle, we assume it to be a reliable driver, not a random person who could be a bad driver.
So please stop comparing to average human drivers.
Also, software gives the possobility that the same shitty driver can drive millions of cars at the same time. One bad commit might cause a disaster. Millions of human drivers wont be possesed by the devil at the same time causing havoc. Imagine all Toyotas turning full left at the same time.
I guess this is your informed opinion that comes after reading about Tesla's autopilot crashes. And I share that opinion.
But I have the feeling that Waymo's system is much more mature than Tesla's. Let's see.
No way. Not even close by any factor. Tesla have real data from real people driving real cars across the world. On the other hand, Waymo have data only from their Test vehicles and augmented scenarios.
https://electrek.co/2018/11/28/tesla-autopilot-1-billion-mil...