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Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

reuters.com

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Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#141

Post by eridius »

Fricken wrote: post #140
eridius wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that? Self-driving cars are more dangerous to the other people sharing the road than the passengers in them.

There's no statistically useful data on that and there won't be for some time.

Well the point I was trying to make was that cars are a danger to everyone else on the road, not just to their passengers, so you can't just say "don't get a self-driving car" in response to someone talking about the risks of self-driving cars, as you can't control whether any of the other cars on the road are self-driving cars.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#142

Post by jacquesm »

Apocryphon wrote: post #119
timthelion wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm reading this correctly, those cars nave no "driver deaths" that means, that no one has died while driving those cars. This is a bit like a shotgun, which has potentially killed many people, but has not killed its owner.

Imagine if everyone was only allowed to drive those 9 car models.

Then there would be deaths. The stats are skewed significantly towards vehicles of which there are more of so you'd always have to discount this figure by how many vehicles there were of that type to begin with and to be even more accurate how many passenger miles were driven with those vehicles.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#143

Post by cwp »

Fricken wrote: post #140
eridius wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that? Self-driving cars are more dangerous to the other people sharing the road than the passengers in them.

There's no statistically useful data on that and there won't be for some time.

Sure there is. Data on accidents involving human drivers is statistically useful for estimating risks from self-driving cars. Yes, driving machines are likely to be better at driving than humans. But there a ton of other factors which are the same. The cars are the same shape, size, weight and materials as cars driven by humans. They drive on the same roads, in the same weather with the same passengers.

It's true that we don't yet know how well self-driving cars will perform at scale. To say that we have no idea what risks are associated with them, or that they pose no risk to anyone but the passengers is ridiculous.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#144

Post by curioussavage »

lorenzhs wrote: post #39
TehCorwiz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving public transportation could provide the benefits of both.

Driverless trains have been here for a while. They're great. With platform-edge doors, nobody can fall or jump onto the track, not to mention that they increase brake cooling efficiency and decrease air resistance (less air to push). But of course you weren't talking about trains. I see this sentiment a lot on HN that self driving cars are going to fix everyone's transportation woes, but I'm not convinced that they w…

I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone claim driverless cars will fix everything

Mass transit specifically trains have serious problems I don’t think there are solutions for. The first is that they make centralized points of failure. Broken trains can bring a whole city to a halt. The second is they are the perfect germ delivery system.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#145

Post by MBCook »

gowld wrote: post #133
MBCook wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you’re preventing 30k deaths that would have happened but causing 8k that wouldn’t... it seems fair for people to be mad about that 8k. Maybe we shouldn’t have rushed into things until that number was way smaller. ‘Diverless cars cause 30% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline.

It's all in the spin: ‘Drivered cars cause 70% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline for drivers.

That’s not new. Right now that number is 100%. People just accept it as status quo.

But people would be outraged by the 30% number.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#146

Post by MBCook »

leadingthenet wrote: post #129
MBCook wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you’re preventing 30k deaths that would have happened but causing 8k that wouldn’t... it seems fair for people to be mad about that 8k. Maybe we shouldn’t have rushed into things until that number was way smaller. ‘Diverless cars cause 30% of road fatalities’ is not a good headline.

It’s still a huge net reduction in deaths anyway you look at it, and there are huge gains in other areas (speed, covenience). I remain very unmoved by that argument. I’d rather be hit by software than a human. At least I know we did as much as we could to alleviate the problem.

I’m not arguing it’s perfectly logical. If people behaved that way the sunk cost fallacy wouldn’t exist.

I think it would be a real problem. If the death count becomes non-trivial before the death count from people becomes relatively trivial I think there’s will be a big mess in the media.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#147

Post by curioussavage »

iainmerrick wrote: post #109
jessriedel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? Or do you really think the litigation system (where currently car manufactures almost are never liable) is properly tuned to minimize the time until that is achieved?

How do you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? I'd say, let's ban using your phone while driving and drinking before driving like many other countries did 10 and 20 years ago. That could save 15k of those people right away.

I’m pretty sure we have laws for that everywhere in the US

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#148

Post by alexhawdon »

timthelion wrote: post #125
Apocryphon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if everyone was only allowed to drive those 9 car models.

I'm a pedestrian. I don't drive. I'm sure the cars don't have air bags on their bumpers.

Actually some Volvos do have pedestrian air bags!

(But your point still stands, of course.)

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#149

Post by nerfhammer »

gowld wrote: post #130
muraiki wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of th…

> including a little javascript widget This is great. You can make any model say anything you want by tuning the parameters, so we needs researchers to stop forcing their preferred parameters, and let consumers check the robustness of the conclusions against ranges of parameters > if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the…

> if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people?

with a handful of centralized systems responsible for every accident everyone will be permanently panicked and outraged at its purportedly uncaring, greedy overlords.

> if somebody you loved was killed by a human-driven car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate was being held back for further testing?

counterfactuals need to be near and specific for people to give them much thought, see:

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/Roese1997...

http://www3.canyons.edu/faculty/rafterm/0%200LLI%20LOVEandLO...

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#150

Post by johncolanduoni »

dragonwriter wrote: post #74
TimTheTinker wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Americans need cars. America is a vast land compared to European countries. Public transportation can only go so far. Some American suburbs stretch more than 80 miles out of major urban centers.

Most Americans need cars because American urban planning has been for many decades built around cars. This, of course, is a solvable problem. (It has nothing to be with how big the US is, it has to do with how US communities are deliberately engineered.)

Solvable by what? Demolishing the suburbs? Building new cities in the middle of nowhere? A time machine?
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