“Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”

I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year.

Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy.

ON THE OTHER HAND...

We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers.

You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents.

If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers.

Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say.

The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.

It’s harder to emotionally cope with, I speculate, when someone you love is killed by a software bug, or by machine learning where no one can precisely explain why it made a certain choice.

I’m not saying I’m against autonomy. I just don’t know how to prevent it being caught in a backlash when people who didn’t have to die, do.

Sure, I understand how a poorly designed steel guardrail can ride up the front of a vehicle and crush the chest of someone I had hugged a week earlier.

My sense is that understanding does not lessen the pain.

You seem to basically be trying to explain how hypothetical people that you are imagining could be experiencing pain that is more salient than mine.

I don't see how this takes us anywhere good.

Not only drivers, but also roads. I would imagine most people using Autopilot use it more on highways than on city streets. The rate of accidents per kilometer is obviously much higher in the city where you have more complex situations and slower speeds. So when comparing autopilot failures we need to take into account not only miles driven, but where they are driven.

The standard shouldn't really vary per-person.

If it's as good as a 50th percentile driver, it's good enough.

If it's as good as a 20th percentile driver, that's also probably fine.

You're right not to touch the mean at all, though.

The problem is if there's any correlation with safe driving and early adoption, a median solution could also lower overall road safety.

For example, teenagers are generally more dangerous drivers than most, safety actually peaks per mile around 60 years old. 60 year olds are more likely to be at peak earning, more able to afford the latest car features.

You're probably right at 20℅ though? This all depends on the curve.

And there's a herd immunity, once most people are driverless, you can probably be less strict as roads become less hazardous overall.

We'd honestly probably make the biggest dent tomorrow by just finding the worst ten percent of drivers and giving them free uber/lyft for life. That would probably save us money as a society, money we could use on driverless tech.

Those aren't teenagers. Judging anecdotally from my time as an attorney, those are serially unemployed middle aged males with revoked licenses who somehow still own an old heavy truck and drive it on the sly with a bottle of something in the glove box.

If you read through case law that profile is weirdly common.

Should ambulances be banned? Subsidized? I can imagine different ways of analyzing the question, but asking "what would you say to the families of those who die" is a nonstarter. There's nothing you can say that will be satisfying, or ease their pain.

Statistics may be cold, but they're the only tool that actually lets us answer the questions like "would fewer people die with or without this change"?

I’m just pointing out there’s a PR problem that may prove tough to manage.

Your argument applies there. "Yes your son became autistic, but someone else's son somewhere else didn't get measles and die."

I understand there are human emotions involved, but my opinion is that significantly reducing death count is still a better outcome. If we can't accept that noticeably better systems will still have faults, and that those faults will result in a different, but smaller number of deaths, then we're content asking for more deaths than necessary.

Eh, Tesla likes to point to this statistic every time the safety of Autopilot comes into question, but it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven.

Detailed data is hard to come by, but more nuanced studies have been far from conclusive in favor of the "Autopilot is safer than human drivers" thesis.

True, and that kind of flawed argument bugs me. However, there is also data that showed that accident rates went down significantly on the same cars after Tesla first enabled autopilot via a software update. This is much more compelling to me; if the same people driving the same cars in the same areas became less likely to get into an accident as soon as autopilot became available, then I don't see how you can really argue that the feature is not beneficial to safety.

That study was later shown to have employed sketchy data and egregiously flawed methodology. A deeper dive showed that the crash rates may have actually gone up with Autopilot. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613

I think it's obvious the answer is: deception*.

But when the argument is "using the vehicle this way is a lot safer than the minimum requirements to be on the road", it's a relevant and fair statistic.

A more fair comparison would be: other drivers of similar demography driving other vehicles of similar age and specifications.

I could buy a car with 3 star crash ratings, and people would be fine with that. I could get in a taxi with a mediocre driver, and people would be fine with that.

Why does the comparison have to be to me driving, in a car like this?

When I'm shopping for a car, it makes sense.

But for public policy discussions, what matters is how the safety ranks against the general population.

You can't determine whether Autopilot makes driving safer by comparing miles driven only on highways by Teslas to miles driven across the whole vehicle fleet.

That assume almost everyone using autopilot will replace that with manual driving in the same car. Some of them might get cheaper cars or take uber and end up less safe.

And even then, there's lots of stuff you can do to a car that makes it less safe that we don't ban, as long as it's still sufficiently safe.

If anything, increase safety standards. If you want to do something that won't cost extra money then do something to ban oversized cars at the same time...

What I mean to say is, when car considering the safety data of any vehicle, it is insufficient to know that the vehicle performs better than whole-fleet.

It’s also necessary to know whether any particular vehicle outperforms others in its class.

One of those without the other is necessary but not sufficient.

The driver that's above average but could be more above average isn't where we need to be fixing things. Not when there are millions of drivers that are either hyper-aggressive or senile still on the roads.