You can fail to be against something without being for it.
I find it strange that people seem to have a problem with my question but no one but me seems to have a problem with someone simultaneously claiming that we need to treat training deaths as shrug-worthy while assuming that driverless vehicles will clearly eliminate huge numbers of deaths annually once they are out there.
This is the first suggestion I have heard that human drivers actively need to be eliminated instead of driverless vehicles being yet one more option in an increasingly diverse transportation ecosystem.
Although I no longer have a driver's license, the implication that someone might desire to outlaw human drivers someday for supposed safety reasons while simultaneously justifying accepting death by driverless vehicle seems somewhat disturbing.
“You can fail to be against something without being for it.”
Not sure what that means, but testing autonomous vehicles will result in deaths. So, you either decide zero deaths are acceptable and don’t test, or allow some deaths and test. There is no third option in this case
Typically, when we test experimental products to gauge their safety and efficacy, we engage in informed consent with the participating parties.
If everyone involved knew the risks, accepted them and moved forward, I'd agree with your premise.
However, if I am walking down the street and I'm run over by a rogue autonomous vehicle, I didn't give consent.
I don't think anyone would be as blasé as they are with autonomous vehicle deaths in a different situation.
For example, if a potential cure for heart disease was tested by dumping it in the public water supply causing people to die, would we have posters here saying that testing such drugs will result in deaths and shrug them off?
> If everyone involved knew the risks, accepted them and moved forward, I'd agree with your premise.
Do you consent to the risks of letting 16 year olds drive? They're high, but you don't get the option.
I understand not agreeing to extremely-risky self-driving cars.
But if they can beat the very lax standards we use to license humans, that should be good enough.
Requiring them to be infinitely more perfect than humans is nonsense. If a car drives you over, do you really care if it was a robot or a human driving? I don't. The most I can ask for is a universal bar. And all the evidence I've seen is that Waymo is meeting that bar.
> For example
People would object because that's a stupid way to test and unrelated to the job of delivering safe water. If you want to talk about real water treatments, we do make tradeoffs!
> Do you consent to the risks of letting 16 year olds drive? They're high, but you don't get the option.
There's a very low bar for them to pass to have their driving privileges revoked if they prove themselves to be a danger.
Society necessitates that people drive. Society does not necessitate that Company X gets autonomous vehicles on the roads by target date Y so that their investors are happy.
> But if they can beat the very lax standards we use to license humans, that should be good enough.
"If". We have some very lax standards for what we consider intelligible English, yet Alexa can't set a timer correctly when I tell it to.
> Requiring them to be infinitely more perfect than humans is nonsense.
Who is proposing this?
> If a car drives you over, do you really care if it was a robot or a human driving? I don't. The most I can ask for is a universal bar.
Do you apply this accident causation blindness universally? Do you care if a person that hits you was drunk or lacked a driver's license vs driving diligently and licensed?
> People would object because that's a stupid way to test and unrelated to the job of delivering safe water. If you want to talk about real water treatments, we do make tradeoffs!
Some people might object to allowing unproven autonomous vehicles onto the street as stupid, but choose not to use that word in effort to have a respectful discussion.
> Typically, when we test experimental products to gauge their safety and efficacy, we engage in informed consent with the participating parties.
The state consented on your behalf. You, in fact, automatically "consented" to all sorts of dangerous and dubious experiments, including democracy itself, when you became a resident. Though the entire idea that self-driving cars are dangerous and experimental has no basis in reality and by all accounts Waymo's cars are ridiculously safe, even if it were the case that they were dangerous Waymo is operating with the full blessings of the Arizona government.
> Society necessitates that people drive. Society does not necessitate that Company X gets autonomous vehicles on the roads by target date Y so that their investors are happy.
Of course society does not "necessitate" anything. Society is not some natural phenomenon like gravity that operates in necessity. And there are many, many people who would point out that they do not agree with and certainly do not consent to America's dangerous obsession with car ownership that kills 50k Americans a year and has tremendous economic and ecological consequences. But alas.
The social contract is not carte blanche allowance for anything to happen. There's a feedback loop involved, in which the governed can give or revoke consent.
> Society is not some natural phenomenon like gravity that operates in necessity.
However, people are driven by natural phenomenon like the conservation of energy, and thus need to eat. For most people in the US, if they want to eat, it is necessary to drive to work.
> And there are many, many people who would point out that they do not agree with and certainly do not consent to America's dangerous obsession
> There's a very low bar for them to pass to have their driving privileges revoked if they prove themselves to be a danger.
Robot privileges can be revoked too.
> Society necessitates that people drive. Society does not necessitate that Company X gets autonomous vehicles on the roads by target date Y so that their investors are happy.
Society necessitates that people use cars to get places. You can 1:1 replace human driving hours with autonomous driving hours.
>> Requiring them to be infinitely more perfect than humans is nonsense.
> Who is proposing this?
Anyone who says that self-driving deaths are 'unacceptable' is requiring self-driving cars to be infinitely more perfect than humans.
> Do you apply this accident causation blindness universally? Do you care if a person that hits you was drunk or lacked a driver's license vs driving diligently and licensed?
Being drunk alters your ability to drive. They would be under the bar.
If someone lacks a license but would have qualified, I guess I don't really care.
> Some people might object to allowing unproven autonomous vehicles onto the street as stupid, but choose not to use that word in effort to have a respectful discussion.
In a way, we're discussing that right now. We're in a thread filled with posters who do not want to revoke those rights on the off chance that more dead people now will prevent even more people from dying in the future.
> Society necessitates that people use cars to get places. You can 1:1 replace human driving hours with autonomous driving hours.
This is a generous hypothetical. Society certainly necessitates that people drive, as there is no other way.
It is not true to say that we can 1:1 replace human driving with autonomous driving, the article in the OP is evidence of this. The chance that autonomous driving will never reach a 1:1 parity with humans is also just as likely.
> Anyone who says that self-driving deaths are 'unacceptable' is requiring self-driving cars to be infinitely more perfect than humans.
If this is your takeaway, I implore you to give this perspective more than a passing thought so that you can reply without turning it into a straw man argument.
> Being drunk alters your ability to drive. They would be under the bar.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, can you clarify?
> If someone lacks a license but would have qualified, I guess I don't really care.
Would you care if they qualified, but had their license revoked, perhaps for hitting people with their car before they hit you?
> All drivers are unproven at first.
Thankfully, we train and test these drivers on closed courses where injury to uninvolved people is minimized before we allow them to go on the open road. We both severely supervise and restrict why, when, how and what they can drive.
> In a way, we're discussing that right now. We're in a thread filled with posters who do not want to revoke those rights on the off chance that more dead people now will prevent even more people from dying in the future.
Some people are willing to trade more deaths now for fewer deaths later. But don't take that as proof that waymo's cars actually will cause more deaths. They've been pretty safe so far.
I'm not arguing that more deaths are acceptable, I'm arguing that some deaths are acceptable if we're going to be consistent with current road policies.
> It is not true to say that we can 1:1 replace human driving with autonomous driving
You misunderstood the 1:1. I mean that you can take particular driving hours and replace them 1:1. That's what the article is about, even. I'm not claiming it will replace all human driving.
> If this is your takeaway, I implore you to give this perspective more than a passing thought so that you can reply without turning it into a straw man argument.
It seems pretty simple to me. "Are you willing to allow self-driving cars that will kill people, if the number of deaths per mile is under some threshold?" What am I missing? I don't want to strawman people, I just want a realistic assessment of risk.
> Would you care if they qualified, but had their license revoked, perhaps for hitting people with their car before they hit you?
Yes, because it means they went under the bar...
> Thankfully, we train and test these drivers on closed courses where injury to uninvolved people is minimized before we allow them to go on the open road.
Your experience is very different from mine. I trained entirely in public areas. I don't even know where I could find a closed course.
Anyone who says that self-driving deaths are 'unacceptable' is requiring self-driving cars to be infinitely more perfect than humans.
That's a distortion of what I said. Furthermore, it's pretty laughable to have my internet comment treated like some kind of legally enforceable policy.
Last I checked, I'm not Queen of the world whose word is law.
Why should it be disturbing?
For me would be far more disturbing to have a safety proven and affordable self driving car that doesn’t drive carelessly causing accidents and to allow humans to continue to drive, at cost of tens of thousands lives per year only in the US.
We discuss privacy issues and the like daily on HN. If software is driving your car, does someone have access to the data on where you go? Can your car be shut down or driven to the nearest police station by a third party? If you are Black, gay or any number of other things, are you cool with giving up such control in an openly hostile social climate? How much cost does it add to the car? If a software update is buggy and you not only can't drive, but it is illegal for a human to drive, does your wife give birth at home while we wait for Google to fix the bug and update the software because you are neither allowed to drive her to the hospital nor is there any such thing as human ambulance drivers anymore?
If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer.
Ask all the millions of people that have a relative killed by a car if they would care at all.
Edit: also it is pretty curious that you are against testing self driving cars because they might kill someone during the testing, while you are perfectly fine with 40k people killed per year and you are concerned about the privacy of the people.
I’ll tell you a secret. A dead person couldn’t care less about his privacy.
You know, someone made a real cavalier sounding remark about how you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette. I replied to that with saying, basically, I understand that attitude for making peace with training deaths in the military but I don't think it's justified for driverless cars. I tried to make it clear later that part of the difference in my mind is that people die in military training because people are being trained to do dangerous things. But if you are training a driverless vehicle, there's really no reason that absolutely has to involve endangering anyone's life.
And, wow, has that gotten tons of push back while people go to great lengths to frame me like I'm some extremist lunatic. Meanwhile, the person cavalierly brushing off training deaths is making rather extreme comments about how driverless vehicles can completely replace all human drivers, etc and most people are not arguing with that. No, I am the one being argued with.
It's starting to look to me like people are basically looking for some silly reason to argue with me in specific. Because I really did not assert a lot of the stuff being hung on me here.
Again, yes, if we can save 40k lives. That's a very big if. It assumes a 100% reduction in mortality. That implies that you expect driverless vehicles to not merely be better than human drivers, you expect them to be perfect and to have flawless performance.
And it's that sort of ridiculous unstated assumption that has me rolling my eyes and going "Wow, people on HN sure are just looking for crazy reasons to argue with me." Because I don't think that's a remotely defensible position.
Yes, because you keep making this statement that it’s not necessary to endanger lives when testing driverless cars. That statement is false. Endangering some lives is a necessary condition for testing driverless cars. Now, maybe we shouldn’t test them and that’s fine, but you are trying to have it both ways.
> If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer.
This is a pretty big assumption without any evidence to support it.
There are many solutions that can potentially save even more lives, such as treatments and cures for heart disease and cancer.
However, I do not see anyone arguing to test these potentially life saving miracles on random people who happen to be walking down the street, like we are with autonomous vehicles.
Certainly, if we relaxed standards on testing cancer and heart disease treatments, we'd rapidly accelerate the development of life-saving cures. The more people we test them on, the better data we'll have to build better models, much like with autonomous driving.
If it can save 500k lives per year from cancer and heart disease, would revoking the need for informed consent to test these potential cures be a no-brainer?
> If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer.
Just saying that doesn't absolve you from making an actual argument.
> Ask all the millions of people that have a relative killed by a car if they would care at all.
How motherfucking dare you! My father did die in a car crash when I was a kid. But I also live in a country where totalitarianism actually happened. You should wash your mouth, and then you should sit down and make the argument.
Because to reply to all of it, including
> "If you are Black, gay or any number of other things, are you cool with giving up such control in an openly hostile social climate?"
with
> "If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer."
is absolutely not good enough. Would you be okay with that being quoted "out of context" like that (it wouldn't really be, it's the degree of seriousness you decided to muster) like that on billboards with your real name attached to it?
I find it strange that people seem to have a problem with my question but no one but me seems to have a problem with someone simultaneously claiming that we need to treat training deaths as shrug-worthy while assuming that driverless vehicles will clearly eliminate huge numbers of deaths annually once they are out there.
This is the first suggestion I have heard that human drivers actively need to be eliminated instead of driverless vehicles being yet one more option in an increasingly diverse transportation ecosystem.
Although I no longer have a driver's license, the implication that someone might desire to outlaw human drivers someday for supposed safety reasons while simultaneously justifying accepting death by driverless vehicle seems somewhat disturbing.