IDK, no fatalities caused by cars?

Cars are large masses moving at high velocity. If there are humans in the vicinity, "no fatalaties" is simply not an option.

you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline.

baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles.

Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?

That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars.

Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win.

When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis.

We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers.

However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice.

For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.

No. Experienced professional human drivers, driving without time pressure.

Public transit. We like to sensationalize every small problem on American buses and trains but they're also a lot safer than cars. Many countries have implemented transit systems around the world and while the US has been designed around the car shortsightedly for decades, transit is a well-understood mode with well-understood safety considerations.

Cities have been designed around cars (or their precursor - horses/horse and carts) for much longer than decades. Individual transport is universally useful; transit is an optimisation for certain situations.

> Individual transport is universally useful

Indeed and the most individual form of transport is walking and most cities in the world are built around walking. Only the US lays its cities out to require cars. It never really laid its cities for horses and carts (with the exception of Salt Lake City.) Before the car, cities were being built around the streetcar, and before that around walking. It's not like people lived in suburbs and went around in horse and buggy lol.

> Only the US lays its cities out to require cars

I don't know where this comes from, other than the usual "US bad". Go to Johannesburg and live in a regular estate without a car.

Why are we bringing in internet baggage here? The US lays its cities out this way due to regulations that codify this. We require that businesses have a certain amount of parking, that residential areas have a certain amount of parking. We require that homes can only be so tall, must have a certain Floor-to-Area ratio. We require that roads must be classified in a local-collector-arterial classification purely based on vehicular flow. We tell civil engineers that they should only build traffic lights if a minimum amount of pedestrian volume exists but that roads need to move a minimum number of cars by default. Sidewalks are required but not even 1/10th of the FHWA codes or the MUTCD deal with pedestrian or cyclist issues. These are all facts.

I'm not familiar with South Africa, but Australia also copied a lot of US auto-centric code regulations, so have no doubt that they did as well. But they very much aren't the norm. Most of Asia (outside of Middle Eastern cities and even here it's a mixed bag with Oman being different than the rest) and Europe are built around pedestrians.

If you think I'm just angry at the US due to some internet lefty baggage, then I don't know what to say. Japan shows that cars and pedestrians can coexist fine when you don't cater to just the car.

The baseline should be other engineering we trust with our lives, like planes, trains, ships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Society expects more from technology than from humans... that's why we use technology! Deaths from self-driving cars should be very minimal, every crash analyzed and understood, and findings publicly communicated and mandated.

It's worth noting that both Waymo and Cruise do report a shit load of statistics to regulatory bodies, including all incident reports. Neither company has caused a fatality to my knowledge.

Waymo did run over a dog https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-k...

They made this public immediately and it was physically impossible to avoid. It ran out basically right in front of the vehicle between some cars. A human driver would have hit the dog too unfortunately.

The dog fatality might not be a human fatality but it’s still a reported fatality.

Also relevant is when Anthony Levandowski at Google / Waymo caused a freeway incident through unsafe testing: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...

While at the time the DMV did not require reporting, later when Levandowski was on trial Google / Waymo hid the video of the incident when it’s existence was finally reported on.

This is where I think edge cases favor the human driver.

Imagine driving by a playground and, instead of a dog, you see a ball roll across the street in front of your car, but you can already intuit that it is rolling fast enough that it won't be an obstacle in your lane. A human driver can intuit from the context (playground + ball) there is a chance a child may come running after that ball, from between those same cars.

While self-driving tech may be faster at 'seeing and classifying'* objects, is it able to predict from a larger context? I haven't seen much to indicate it can. I think that's where a lot of the edge cases are going to come from. Driving is more than just 'see object and make a decision'.

*Because most of the tech is relatively opaque to the public, this performance seems to be generally taken on faith. But what the Uber accident in AZ showed is that (with that system, at that time, at least) the self-driving tech really wasn't very good at classification in real-time.

Assuming that self-driving cars increase the total miles driven, then we would need to pro-rate the human baseline to account for the excess deaths caused by more miles driven.