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

#111

Post by friend_and_foe » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 1:00 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #89

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…

> 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…

While I agree with you, my hypothetical scenario above was deliberately constructed to avoid ascribing worth to distinct people, and only measuring how much of the outcome was the result of their negligent or deliberate behavior. We can come to the same conclusions while still assuming all lives have equal worth. All we have to do is determine where the fault lies. If a person jumps out in front of my car because they want to die, that's not my fault. If I run a stop sign and t bone a person it is. The same if I'm a computer in the trunk of a Tesla, and we want to be sure that if we are going to construct an environment where machines call the shots that they're less dangerous, so we should be sure that at the very least they're causing less accidents than people, not simply that they're participating in less accidents. Just the number of deaths doesn't give us this measure, it doesn't actually tell us how safe the machine is. What we ultimately want is primarily that the machine is less often at fault than a human driver, secondarily but very importantly that the machine avoids harming others even when those others are negligent and at fault, and also can avoid harming people in situations deliberately caused by others, particularly if those harmed weren't those causing the situation.

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

#112

Post by simondotau » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 3:47 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #107

simondotau wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will still matter. Unpopular new laws aren't guaranteed to survive swings of political power. Local/state governments could permit it, and a politically motivated national/federal government could amend the manslaughter laws in a way that would make autonomous vehicles untenable.

(It's sad that society is obsessed with politicising everything and everyone. I don't agree with some of Musk's political views, but so what? I never expected to be in perfect alignment with him or anyone else anyway. And it would be the height of arrogance to assume that my views are consistently better than his, rather than a different order of priorities resulting in a different set of trade-offs.)

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

#113

Post by simondotau » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

friend_and_foe wrote: post #110

simondotau wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 calculati…

To be clear, my use of 125 and 100 is only to mirror the post I was replying to. Expressed as a trolley problem I would choose that trade-off. As a real world proposition no society would, and certainly no autonomous vehicle operator would — for precisely the reason you state. We don't like robots which kill people.

As I've said elsewhere, I don't expect any autonomous driving system to be anything less than 10X safer than human drivers, or one order of magnitude. And I don't think there could ever be a durable social warrant for autonomous vehicles unless they're at least 100X safer, or two orders of magnitude.[0]

Given a minimum expectation of being 10X safer, and given that drivers don't get to choose the demographics of people who place themselves in harm's way near our roads, it is statistically unfathomable that autonomous vehicles could ever be net more dangerous for any demographic.

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[0] If anything I feel that's too conservative and three orders of magnitude might be closer to the threshold at which societies would tolerate autonomous cars. Road deaths in the USA are in the order of 40,000 annually. Three orders of magnitude still means 40 deaths per year. That's plenty enough to keep the press aroused and erect.