Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders • Hacker News Board

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#171

Post by euyyn » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

Spare_account wrote: post #79

maxfurman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably. Tesla has not done a good job educating their customers on the limits of their "Autopilot" system, which has led to at least one preventable death. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/tesla_autopilot_dea...

Is it possible to extrapolate from the recorded reduction in accidents after the introduction of autopilot and work out if fewer people have died as a result of introducing when they did? Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh... The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes af…

The person you're responding to isn't claiming that Tesla hasn't done a good job in the technology, rather in educating their users of its limits:

> Tesla has not done a good job educating their customers on the limits of their "Autopilot" system

The death was preventable, even with the technology deployed.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#172

Post by gfodor » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

monkmartinez wrote: post #153

jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

No you are not! HN seems to think the same way, and it is one of the worst cases of rose colored glasses I have ever witnessed. What about the cost? Who is going to be able to afford this? Also, what about people that rely on a vehicle for work? Retrofit $75K work trucks with another $75K in self driving gizmos? Find me a practical plumber, carpenter, A/C, lock smith, self-employed guy/gal that will sign up for that!…

Serious question: why is cost such a common argument made here against emerging tech? This argument seems to come up every time some new expensive technology is transitioning closer to consumers' hands, and the current price, which is obviously expected to go down at scale as it does for nearly all widely useful technology, is used as evidence nobody will be able to afford it. I've seen this argument made for technology that is still in the R&D phase, for goodness sake!

Obviously, the assumption of all those involved is that the price will plummet as the technology becomes more adopted, so the goal is to get to a price point where the earliest adopters will be willing to pay. For self driving cars, talking about plumbers not buying this at the current price point is a bizarre argument.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#173

Post by asdfjklasdfjkl » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

chiliap2 wrote: post #116

Spare_account wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to extrapolate from the recorded reduction in accidents after the introduction of autopilot and work out if fewer people have died as a result of introducing when they did? Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh... The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes af…

The utilitarian approach is such an interesting way to frame problems like this. It's obviously wrong for me to murder to my neighbor for their organs, even if those organs could save five other lives. But is it okay for a car company to roll out an AI program if it saves more lives than it costs? When viewed from afar the utilitarian mindset is always so alluring.

I think you're making a bit of a strawman here that people usually do with respect to utilitarianism. The utilitarian answer with 5 people on an island, where 1 is a doctor, 3 need organs, the remaining person has available organs, and the 3 are necessary to keep the group alive -- is to kill the one person and take their organs.

However, in a society where people can observe the actions of others and form motivations in response to policies, etc, you'll find that because society reacts fairly poorly to organ harvesting, because organ harvesting is implausible to do at scale without extra bad things happenning, etc, the utilitarian solution is actually not to go about doing it.

Only a naive utilitarian wouldn't try to also remain consistent with something like a Kantian imperative of global self-coherence.

Now, as for cars and testing self-driving on real folks, well, this may be something where the water is pretty murky. I think that society will react poorly enough to early bad events in self-driving that a measured approach is actually the best for saving lives in the long term.

The critique here shouldn't be that "well, utilitarianism sure looks good from afar, but would you murder your neighbor?" It should be "The problem is too difficult to address with utilitarianism because it involves complex societal factors and responses."

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#174

Post by euyyn » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

brilliantcode wrote: post #159

aianus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.

> Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something. There's no evidence to suggest that is the case. If anything, Tesla has made it more dangerous to assume that it's safe and falsely autonomous. When you create new drugs, the FDA definitely doesn't look to kindly on people who think like Sil…

> people who think like Silicon Valley. "Killing people is product testing"

Not sure you can attribute that thinking to any of the actual engineers working on this.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#175

Post by notahacker » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #77

monkmartinez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read the entire piece... People think the autonomous car is going to solve a lot of the current problems; Accidents, Parking, Congestion. It kind of makes me giggle a bit, as I ponder what may happen. That is, the conclusions drawn from "self-driving" vehicles are possibly way over cooked. The certification process for these cars are going to be very, very expensive. Think about the software involved for the…

If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones. There's a strong moral case for banning human-driven cars on public roads if it'll save tens of thousands of lives. There's also a strong possibility of media-driven moral panics. Think of poor little Billy, hit by one of those irresponsible human drivers! Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want t…

> If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones.

That sounds like a bold claim. I mean, the current standard of technology works to quite a good extent already, performing many aspects of driving with considerably greater acumen than humans and being able to operate for extended periods without human intervention. It's also fairly well documented that the number of situations in which the software would have caused an accident without human intervention is above the average accident rate for human drivers, despite being tested in favourable conditions with sensibly conservative rules around humans intervening for a wide range of reasons before a critical situation can develop.

So it already works whilst being substantially less safe than the average human driver (without human intervention). They're working on the making-it-safer part, but given the number of edge cases they've got to deal with for Level 5 driving capability I'm not sure we should be so sure it'll surpass human driving abilities in all road conditions.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#176

Post by BurningFrog » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

chiliap2 wrote: post #116

Spare_account wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to extrapolate from the recorded reduction in accidents after the introduction of autopilot and work out if fewer people have died as a result of introducing when they did? Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh... The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes af…

The utilitarian approach is such an interesting way to frame problems like this. It's obviously wrong for me to murder to my neighbor for their organs, even if those organs could save five other lives. But is it okay for a car company to roll out an AI program if it saves more lives than it costs? When viewed from afar the utilitarian mindset is always so alluring.

I don't think replacing one set of risks with a smaller set of risks is at all morally similar to killing one person to save three.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#177

Post by petters » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

monkmartinez wrote: post #153

jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

No you are not! HN seems to think the same way, and it is one of the worst cases of rose colored glasses I have ever witnessed. What about the cost? Who is going to be able to afford this? Also, what about people that rely on a vehicle for work? Retrofit $75K work trucks with another $75K in self driving gizmos? Find me a practical plumber, carpenter, A/C, lock smith, self-employed guy/gal that will sign up for that!…

In my opinion, the primary use case of self-diving cars aren't personal ownership. Society as a whole wastes a lot of resources when every household has a car that stands still 95% of the time. With self-driving cars, we can plausibly improve that.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#178

Post by zeven7 » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

wcummings wrote: post #126

evanpw wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really like hearing about tax money going into these projects It might be better to think of it as an investment in public health rather than public transportation. Preventing the huge number of deaths caused by human drivers is more important than speeding up traffic.

There are lots of simpler ways to reduce traffic deaths that we could be funding.

Options that Americans would choose to use?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#179

Post by ghaff » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:08 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #162

ghaff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that today the average age of cars on the road is something like ten years. Many people don't and many people can't afford to buy new vehicles. They may not have the money to deal with that fixit ticket which probably has to be handled by a licensed service station with a lot of fancy equipment. So, if all this comes to pass, you'll end up with a system where the wealthy lease or ride-share their self-dr…

Sure, I was talking about addressing a particular safety issue with autonomous vehicles, not trying to solve economic inequality.

However, if autonomous vehicles are just for the wealthy end of society whether directly or by way of limo and taxi services, they're not going to be particularly welcomed by everyone else (aka the majority of voters).

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#180

Post by pps43 » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

MarkMc wrote: post #144

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of respect for Waymo's approach to this. While Tesla and Uber have both just recklessly (imo) jumped in and started setting loose self driving cars and making bold claims, Google/Waymo has really taken a slow and measured approach and given great care to making sure their cars are actually safe.

Actually I think Waymo is too cautious. Tesla has thousands of customers effectively acting as test drivers for their autonomous software, which allows them to collect data at a much faster rate and discover more 'edge cases' than with a more cautious test environment. 33,000 people die each year on US roads and self driving cars offer the chance to dramatically reduce that figure over time. The more aggressively we…

Self driving cars also offer the chance to dramatically increase that figure. They have failure modes that do not exist with human drivers. Cautious is good.