It doesn't make any sense to look at a situation and say "well, I could save 5 lives at no cost ... but nah". It really doesn't matter who is responsible when a self driving car kills someone. We're going to respond by making the self-driving module of the car safer whether it is responsible or not.

We're putting a driver on the road who can still learn after suffering a fatal accident! This is huge, it means all parts of the system can learn from anything and will practically eliminate deaths in the long term; much like in the airline industry. If the short term is safer but confusing we should do that and who cares about philosophical technicalities.

This attitude could literally get people killed for no measurable gain. Saving lives and reducing road deaths (which comes with a whole host of other benefits, like freeing up an enormous number of hours of people's time) is much more important than worrying about holding people responsible. We shouldn't be trying to hold people responsible for tragedies, we should be trying to prevent tragedies!

And we need to keep getting self driving cars into common use to push them up the technological learning curve . This is much more important than worrying about who is at fault because it will make the cars an order of magnitude safer. The payoffs here are so huge it is even worth putting them on the road if they are slightly less safe than humans then subsidising the producer's legal costs to hold their risk down.

>who cares about philosophical technicalities

The whole argument above is built upon the assumption that everybody agrees with a utilitarian mindset so I’m assuming the answer to the question, in part, is you should care about the philosophical underpinnings.

Which philosophy are people subscribing to where they are happy to accept a mound of corpses in exchange for holding someone accountable?

Not preventing them from doing something in the future, mind you. Holding them accountable won't be a net long term improvement. Just accountability for the sake of punishment.

I'm sure there are people who believe that, but I suspect most of the reputable philosophers will agree with the utilitarians on this particular issue.

It is difficult to defend against "your stubbornness will cause mounds of corpses for no obvious gain". This is a pretty clear cut line of approach.

It's not so much about accountability in the legal sense, it's in the public perception sense.

"Old Uncle Bob forgot his glasses again and ran over a kid" doesn't have any implication regarding my use of a car. "A self-driving Tesla was confused by work signage and ran over a kid" would destroy a lot of trust into self-driving cars.

>Which philosophy are people subscribing to where they are happy to accept a mound of corpses in exchange for holding someone accountable?

(I'm not a philosopher so maybe somebody with an actual background can correct me if I'm wrong)

Ignoring the hyperbole in your statement, I think the traditional counterpoint to consequentialism is deontology. Meaning, the intent behind an action matters despite the consequences. So if you are willingly putting people at risk in the short-term for the "long term good", it's morally wrong. History is rife with examples of how taking an "ends justify the means" philosophy can lead to truly abhorrent policy decisions.

>but I suspect most of the reputable philosophers will agree with the utilitarians on this particular issue.

This comes across as a "no true Scotsman" defense by implying if one is not a utilitarian in this case, they must not be reputable. Kant is generally considered a "reputable" philosopher and would likely fall on the deontological side of the argument as would many others.

>This is a pretty clear cut line of approach.

Ethics is not mathematics so there is often no "clear cut" answer. If you are defining policy, absolutism in this realm is dangerous; you have to acknowledge other people's morals may differ from yours and not fall prey to the presumption that just because it makes sense to you, it must be right.

> Meaning, the intent behind an action matters despite the consequences. So if you are willingly putting people at risk...

People by and large don't intend to put people at risk. The intent of someone who causes a car crash is rarely malicious.

> This comes across as a "no true Scotsman" defense...

I suspect Kant would agree with me that it would be a difficult argument to carry as a philosopher when you are arguing in favour of increasing the corpse count for no particular reason. "If a self-driving car bugs out and kills someone, who's responsible?" certainly isn't a reason to kill people. We can afford to live in ignorance if it means more people live to die in their old age.

I'm on board with the idea that maybe someone has a reason that it is a good idea to just let people kill each other by accident. But so far in this thread nobody has bought one up.

>The intent of someone who causes a car crash is rarely malicious.

And yet it happens, which is to the point and (depending on locality) people are still held accountable. Adopting nascent technologies almost always comes with risk tradeoffs because we don't yet have a solid understanding of the latent risks. Look at aircraft statistics if you need an example. To your point, over time they will improve, but not without accepting additional risk in the near-term. The last point is false only if you believe we understand the risk profile enough to unequivocally say autonomous cars are safer in all conditions. I don't think we can claim that yet.

What you're advocating is like someone in the early 1950s being told "Just make everyone fly in a de Havilland Comet! Don't you know air travel is going to be the safest mode of travel per mile!?" While true over the long run and in the aggregate, that individual on the Comet is being told to take an outsized risk. I'm making the claim that some people (not even necessarily me) would have a moral issue with being told at the individual level they need to take a larger risk for the betterment of society in the future.

So even while in the long time horizon they may be safer, or even be safer in the aggregate now, you could be subjecting passengers to higher risks in those individual cases. I can't speak for Kant, but I think some people may think it's immoral to draconianly force them to accept that risk. Kant speaks against the hypothetical imperative which is a motivation to obtain certain ends (like forcing policy that reduces traffic deaths in the aggregate).

If you disagree, ask yourself or others a hypothetical: take whomever you love the most in this world whether it's a child, a parent, or a dog. Would you be willing to adopt a rule today that they can never step foot in an ape-driven car for the rest of their life and every instance of travel be relegated to autonomous vehicles? Even if you are okay with that risk, there are plenty of people who would balk at it.

What makes you think cars will ever drive more safely than humans? What if they don’t? This always seems to just be a given, but like GP, I think “self driving safer than humans” requires GAI unless maybe you make massive changes to the road infra.

There’s no need for GAI, a driver doesn’t need to solve logic puzzles or crosswords or diagnose medical conditions.

A driver needs to identify lanes, understand road markings and signs, model the physics of moving objects and predict the immediate future behaviour of other objects based on immediate past behaviour.

Also basing an evaluation of FSD on current AP behaviour is like assuming a housekeeper will be as effective as a Roomba.

For me 10% safer is enough when I pick between Uber or self driving. The truth is though that we're stull far from that treshold.

theres actually no proof of the claim that its safer or even as safe as human driving. The only "data" is from tesla themselves. Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.

> Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.

This is false: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before a crash."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

It would be more helpful to focus on actually deceptive issues in how they report data, namely the conflation of easy highway miles (Autopilot enabled) with more dangerous city driving (Autopilot unavailable). For example their Q1 2021 report:

"In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles."

You are correct about the 100ms (although 5s is too short, should be something like 30 given our understanding of task switching) but it's worth pointing out that the comparison you quote (and all those like it, not just from Tesla) is disingenuous.

All the self driving companies do this, but it only makes sense to compare # of accidents/mile between like processes. It's an ok proxy for total risk iff accidents were uniformly distributed, but we know that isn't even close to true.

With a system like Teslas', it is preferentially, probably approximately exclusively if normalized by distance, deployed in situations with a lower accident rate - comparing that to total rates is nonsense.

What would be more interesting is Tesla vs. human accident rates on only freeway miles, say, but I haven't seen that anywhere, have you?

Best rough stats I can find is that less than 1/2 of all accidents happen on highways. There are a also a ton of fender-bender, parking lot and/or traffic jam accidents that aren't really applicable either.

Yes, and in addition, the comparison should be between similar vehicle body styles and manufacturing years.

True; a really interesting way to do these comparisons would be by narrow year, vehicle category, and purchaser (e.g. don't conflate fleet sales to private) as it normalizes a bunch of factors all at once. Sample size can be a problem, I expect.

5 seconds is not nearly enough time. If you need to drive 3 seconds behind a vehicle going the same speed as you to have safe reaction time & stopping distance, then you certainly can't (a) move your attention back to the road you weren't looking at because "autopilot" "self-driving" and (b) react to a stationary object and (c) come to a stop, all in 5.

*except in cases where the black box is totally destroyed due to 4 hour battery fires.

yeah maybe i was exaggerating but autopilot can definitely get you in positions where its impossible to get out of and the deactivate 5 secs before actual collision.

And autopilot is only engaged on highways but they are comparing its safety to accidents per mile in general. But those stats are strongly skewed by city and non-highway driving, where autopilot doesnt work at all.