Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#101

Post by grecy » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #95

kbenson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The details of their deaths are no important. Saving 25 lives per day is clearly the right thing to do. I think it's clear that if we were talking about saving 125 people 90 years old or older or 100 children, the clear choice is to save the children, from almost any rational point of view. Even just from a societal health or utility standpoint, children are worth more than people that are statistically close to de…

That's an absurd concern. Children are already the most at-risk on our roads right now, with humans behind the wheel. We're already living your nightmare. The rise of autonomous vehicles isn't going to increase the likelihood of basketballs accidentally bouncing into the street. Nor will it cause a wild swing in the demographic mix of people using pedestrian crossings. By the time they're widely deployed, autonomous…

> I think one order of magnitude is the least we should demand. I would consider it a rather low bar. I suspect that it'd need to be more like two orders of magnitude in order to retain sufficient community consent.

So right now we have 125 deaths every single day on the roads in the US. Same today. Same tomorrow. 45,625 every single year. Year after year.

You're saying it would need to be So that means if we invent some system that reduces the number of deaths PER DAY from 125 down to, let's say, 30, you think we SHOULD NOT implement it, because that's not enough of an improvement?

Let's say that system is the best we can ever make, but we decide to never turn it on, because it's not a whole order of magnitude better. You're choosing to kill an additional 34,675 people per year, because a reduction in deaths from 125 per day down to 30 per day is "not good enough".

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#102

Post by kbenson » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #92

kbenson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The details of their deaths are no important. Saving 25 lives per day is clearly the right thing to do. I think it's clear that if we were talking about saving 125 people 90 years old or older or 100 children, the clear choice is to save the children, from almost any rational point of view. Even just from a societal health or utility standpoint, children are worth more than people that are statistically close to de…

> I think it's clear that if we were talking about saving 125 people 90 years old or older or 100 children, the clear choice is to save the children, from almost any rational point of view. Even just from a societal health or utility standpoint, children are worth more than people that are statistically close to death anyway at a societal level. That assumes that the people currently being killed on the roads are "le…

Yes, there is no evidence. The point I was trying to make is that gathering that evidence and knowing what is happening is important. It's not enough to just assume any drop in deaths is automatically better than previously, when what we're talking about is a drastic change in how the overall system operates.

Im not arguing that autonomous cars will be worse, I'm just arguing there is the possibility for them to be worse in non-obvious ways, and you prior arguments seemed to ignore that. We should not be so blinded by a single metric that we fail to understand what's really going on. To are many cases of that in technological advances, legislative change, and societal shifts, that we aren't aware of until long after the additional damage has been done.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#103

Post by kbenson » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #95

kbenson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The details of their deaths are no important. Saving 25 lives per day is clearly the right thing to do. I think it's clear that if we were talking about saving 125 people 90 years old or older or 100 children, the clear choice is to save the children, from almost any rational point of view. Even just from a societal health or utility standpoint, children are worth more than people that are statistically close to de…

That's an absurd concern. Children are already the most at-risk on our roads right now, with humans behind the wheel. We're already living your nightmare. The rise of autonomous vehicles isn't going to increase the likelihood of basketballs accidentally bouncing into the street. Nor will it cause a wild swing in the demographic mix of people using pedestrian crossings. By the time they're widely deployed, autonomous…

I think you misunderstood the point of my comment.

If indeed it is an order of magnitude less deaths, then it probably doesn't matter if the demographics shift, but we actually have to see that change and know the demographics to actually know that. I'm just saying that we should pay attention, as we should with anything that has the capability to change per-capita figures for adverse actions, as to what is actually happening and not assume.

That said, since we're already seeing an increase in these cars and the use of their autonomous options which match "self-driving" to greater or lesser degrees, I doubt we're going to see a 10x decrease before they are inthe wild, because to some degree they already are.

I just want us to know what that means by looking at as much info as we can rather than a single metric.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#104

Post by gnicholas » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #87

gnicholas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to see flagged postings?

I read HN as a single HTML page in a text-only browser. For example, it's about 7MB today. To read the flagged submissions I do something like sed -n '/\[flagged\]/p' yc.htm > 1.htm links -no-connect 1.htm This excludes the comments so I can evaluate the submission myself without the noise. Or, if I'm reading yc.htm, I might search for the pattern "[flagged]" in the page. In the browser I use, searching is done with…

Nice. I've thought it would be nice to be able to view posts that made it to the front page, and perhaps surpassed some level of commenting, and were then flagged off.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#105

Post by simondotau » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #101

simondotau wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absurd concern. Children are already the most at-risk on our roads right now, with humans behind the wheel. We're already living your nightmare. The rise of autonomous vehicles isn't going to increase the likelihood of basketballs accidentally bouncing into the street. Nor will it cause a wild swing in the demographic mix of people using pedestrian crossings. By the time they're widely deployed, autonomous…

> I think one order of magnitude is the least we should demand. I would consider it a rather low bar. I suspect that it'd need to be more like two orders of magnitude in order to retain sufficient community consent. So right now we have 125 deaths every single day on the roads in the US. Same today. Same tomorrow. 45,625 every single year. Year after year. You're saying it would need to be So that means if we invent…

I’m saying that 10x should be a low expectation for a system that doesn’t get distracted, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t get drowsy, doesn’t get angry, doesn’t get a bruised ego, doesn’t have a TikTok account, and can look in every direction at every moment.

But if the best we can do is a 9x improvement of course we should still deploy it. The question is whether society will accept it. I’m not sure it would. I’m not sure it would accept a system that reduced deaths by two orders of magnitude, or 100x.

Imagine for a moment, Tesla fully cracks the FSD nut, and every car on the road is replaced with a self driving Tesla, 100 times safer than humans. “One person is dying at the hands of the pedestrian butcher Elon Musk every single day!” the headlines will cry.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#106

Post by hmottestad » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #42

justin_oaks wrote: post #21

I don't believe that partially automated driving, as shown by Autopilot is fit for human use. People will rely on it as if it's fully automated and more accidents like this will happen. We see this same problem with face recognition software that says an innocent man's face matches a criminal. The cops just accept what the computer says and arrest people because the computer says it's a match. We can't have the machi…

Most new cars are sold with features roughly in parity with Autopilot. If this was a problem, we’d already see it in pedestrian injury statistics. (You may have a point with respect to systems like Supercruise and Tesla FSD, but that’s not the topic of this article.)

I wouldn't say "most". I've tested Toyota and Nissan, and they can't even drive on a normal road and are barely useful on a motorway. Every time there is a merge lane on the right they will both creep into that lane once the lane markings disappear. Nissan's ProPilot can't handle a regular meandering road, at the first sign of a tight corner it will give up, but not before pretending that everything is fine leaving you with 2 seconds to stop it from driving off the road. I think that Tesla is about 20 years ahead of Toyota and 50 years ahead of Nissan.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#107

Post by grecy » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:04 AM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #105

grecy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think one order of magnitude is the least we should demand. I would consider it a rather low bar. I suspect that it'd need to be more like two orders of magnitude in order to retain sufficient community consent. So right now we have 125 deaths every single day on the roads in the US. Same today. Same tomorrow. 45,625 every single year. Year after year. You're saying it would need to be So that means if we invent…

I’m saying that 10x should be a low expectation for a system that doesn’t get distracted, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t get drowsy, doesn’t get angry, doesn’t get a bruised ego, doesn’t have a TikTok account, and can look in every direction at every moment. But if the best we can do is a 9x improvement of course we should still deploy it. The question is whether society will accept it. I’m not sure it would. I’m not sur…

> “One person is dying at the hands of the pedestrian butcher Elon Musk every single day!”

You're absolutely right, but it won't make any difference if the laws are passed.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#108

Post by friend_and_foe » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #77

friend_and_foe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a thought experiment. A spherical cow that demonstrates that simply measuring the aggregate death count is lossy, it assumes that the proportion of pedestrian deaths where the pedestrian is at fault remains the same in both situations which is not true, so I draw a picture which makes that glaring distinction. We need to know the details of these deaths to know which scenario is preferable. Here, reverse my scen…

I strongly disagree with your premise. Current situation: 125 people are killed every single day Future autonomous situation: 100 people are killed every single day I don't care who they are, what they were doing or why they were killed. The details of their deaths are no important. Saving 25 lives per day is clearly the right thing to do. Hint: Imagine all of these people are your family and friends. Do you want to…

You can reject my premise, but it is sound. If self driving cars only ever killed people that jumped in front of them deliberately, that's a resounding success, that means they never accidentally kill anyone. So if self driving cars swerve more efficiently to avoid hitting suicides but are worse at stopping at a crosswalk for children, thats an abysmal failure, they accidentally kill people more than humans do. Your take - that any amount of decrease in death is sufficient - is excessively reductionist because it doesn't actually measure how much safer the car is than a human driver. For it to be a reliable measure we have to accept the premise that the same proportion of pedestrian deaths will be due to deliberate action or negligence of the pedestrian, an unfounded premise, much more absurd than mine, and one that ignores the ruthlessness with which machines execute their instructions. Your hint attempting to emotionally sensationalize your argument does nothing to make it more convincing.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#109

Post by friend_and_foe » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:42 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #101

simondotau wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absurd concern. Children are already the most at-risk on our roads right now, with humans behind the wheel. We're already living your nightmare. The rise of autonomous vehicles isn't going to increase the likelihood of basketballs accidentally bouncing into the street. Nor will it cause a wild swing in the demographic mix of people using pedestrian crossings. By the time they're widely deployed, autonomous…

> I think one order of magnitude is the least we should demand. I would consider it a rather low bar. I suspect that it'd need to be more like two orders of magnitude in order to retain sufficient community consent. So right now we have 125 deaths every single day on the roads in the US. Same today. Same tomorrow. 45,625 every single year. Year after year. You're saying it would need to be So that means if we invent…

Nobody is choosing to kill anybody, we are talking about ideal scenarios, you should quit trying to moralize the discussion to impune those you disagree with. Address the points they're making rather than harping on the fact that they don't agree with yours.

Re: Tesla driver who killed 2 people while using autopilot must pay $23,000, no jail

#110

Post by friend_and_foe » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #94

grecy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree with your premise. Current situation: 125 people are killed every single day Future autonomous situation: 100 people are killed every single day I don't care who they are, what they were doing or why they were killed. The details of their deaths are no important. Saving 25 lives per day is clearly the right thing to do. Hint: Imagine all of these people are your family and friends. Do you want to…

Effectively it's a version of the trolley problem. Do you do nothing and 125 people die per day or do you pull a lever and 100 people die per day? Would you pull that lever? I would.

I would want to understand the differences in who it would kill. If not pulling the lever, 70 of those are suicides, and if pulling it only 10 are, you're actually killing more people by pulling the lever, and potentially subjecting unwilling participants to continued suffering.

But my main point is that it is a machine pulling the lever or not. Once you deploy such a machine we are all subject to it's cold calculation. We should go the extra mile to make sure the world we live in winds up being better and not just assume less deaths = better outcome.