People die all the time from driving under a semi-trailer. Look up "Underride". Over 200 people die every year from underride crashes in the US, so this isn't a mistake made only by autopilots. In other words, if we switched to self-driving cars and three people died every week when the autopilot drove into a semi-trailer, that would be a big improvement.

So, your family would be ok that your car sheared you off in a quirk unnecessary accident, so long as the overall stats were better than average?

Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.

Given 100 individuals who would have died in everyday accidents all would prefer a 99% chance of survival.

Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion.

Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.

Let's say your autodrive system replaces 100,000 driver-hours.

Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).

Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.

It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.

The trolley problem challenges people who don't consider choosing not to act equally an active choice or intuitively feel that action is different than inaction.

I would always pick the most valuable to me side and pull the switch or leave it be to bring about the better end result. Given the availability of self driving vehicles that reduce mortality choosing to drive oneself and kill more people is an unethical choice that will be as little comfort to the 3 victims as the one.

  I would always pick the most valuable to me side

Of course, when you know nothing about the would-be victims. But on a pure numbers theoretical basis, you autodrive veers out away from the three killers fleeing police by driving on the wrong side of the road in favor of running down two kids in a crosswalk.

Real life is complicated.

Where did I say I would decide value purely by number of people?

Why did you include the fact that they were killers fleeing police? Are, you supposing that I will somehow infer this in the 2 seconds I have to react or you just positing completele nonsense to muddy the waters with emotions?

Pedanticaly one would virtually never choose to hit pedestrians instead of cars because pedestrians don't have crumple zones or air bags.

The big question is should cars prioritize the owners health or the greater good and If the latter what is the greater good.

I don't think people will turn on a product that might decide to kill them to save a school bus so it's simplified to minimizing chance of fatalities while protecting the owner absolutely even if this risks others.

It's essentially unheard-of that one's own failure to use a seatbelt results in injury or death to some other party hit by the flying driver/passenger who was unbelted. That's the appropriate analogy.

That’s not how it works for humans though. “Other drivers are terrible. I am above average. Other drivers underride. I don’t”

Do you not fly in airplanes? People make tradeoffs like this ALL the time. It's why the term "freak accident" even exists. People trade off freak accidents against convenience and quality of life, let alone a _higher_ rate of non-freak accidents.

You are overcomplicating things. Every minute of drive time is Russian roulette with on average very low chances of losing.

The only thing that matters is the overall odds there is no inherent mathematical difference between the 2 scenarios.

There is no difference to prefer more likely death in common scenario to less likely death in a stupider scenario.

If you believe otherwise you ought to explicate with numbers.

That doesn't sound like a proper set of assumptions - that human accidents will be fender benders while self driving will be chunk-salsa worthy. The cumulative fatality risk applies to both parties. Humans will die in fatal accidents that no Self Driving car would do.

The 1000x better demand is more a stupid human illusion of control thing like fearing flying more than a road trip of equal distance.

Please don't let downvotes get to you like this. I know it's not always easy, but the site guidelines ask it explicitly of everyone. That's because it quickly causes comments to sink below the acceptable levels, which is what happened here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for all you do, dang!

However, unless HN implements K-Means clustering, a single-axis downvote mechanism will inevitably lead to echo-chamber bullying, I believe.

Especially if no-one fights back, encouraging the people who vote “sensible” vs “nonsense”, and discouraging the “like” vs “don’t like” voters who ruin debate.

In my experience, everyone is a like vs. don't-like voter.