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A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

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Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#491

Post by palata »

khazhoux wrote: post #425
palata wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago This is factually wrong: I did not.

I apologize if I gave the impression that I had personal knowledge of your driving record and traffic violations spanning over the last 36 months. I assure you, my intent in using the word "you" was merely to illustrate a general situation in which an individual (though surely not yourself, palata, specifically), will find themselves being penalized for a prior incident. As my comment was surely read by thousands of…

Let me just try to understand your point. Someone says "you are objectively higher risk than an autonomous car, so it's normal that your insurance makes you pay more if you drive".

To which I answer: "how objective is that, when the claim comes from the company selling the autonomous car?"

Then you tell me something that I understand as: "well, you are objectively higher risk because if you look at your record, you have made mistakes that show that your are".

And when I say "actually, I haven't", you patronize me? Is that how it works?

No. I haven't killed more people than autonomous cars have. Before you can prove that over my life as a driver, I will cause more damage than an autonomous car would have, then you don't get to say that I am objectively higher risk and therefore should pay more insurance.

Now you can try to look at studies that try to prove that. And when I ask "how objective is that?" when the study comes from those who benefit from those results, you can stop for a minute and consider that maybe, I am allowed to ask.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#492

Post by Dalewyn »

Mawr wrote: post #460
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they wouldn't mind open sourcing their whole system, including for other commercial ventures You seem to just not like that this is done by Google. (Or by any private entity.) That is fine. I, like, hate this one restaurant in New York. But be honest about your motivations and check your biases. This isn’t self-driving cars vs public transit debate because there isn’t one. If Google were funding a leg of passenger…

> The world’s largest rail system, period. I despise this way of arguing. Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever. Such a crude metric is entirely insufficient to back up an argument about how great American railways supposedly are. What's the ticket cost for the passengers compared to other countries? Average train delay? Cancellation rate? Speed? Death rate? The argument is not look…

>Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever.

It actually is. Japan's new maglev shinkansen line is stalling because they can't get land rights to lay rail through.[1]

An even more blasphemous example is California's high speed rail project which never accomplishes anything, but I'm pretty sure that also suffers from a severe case of legalized money laundering.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen#Shiz...

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#493

Post by heroprotagonist »

tim333 wrote: post #384
heroprotagonist wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we won't need horse drivers either. But you might decide to build in enough additional taxes on the self-driving vehicles to cover at least the state's increased costs in terms of unemployment, medical, and services. This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.

What is the normal annual turnover in those 2.3 million drivers? 20% perhaps? I doubt self driving cars are going to replace 20% a year - they'll take many years to roll out. So it'll just be less people entering the field rather than mass layoffs.

This presupposes that the move won't be forced. It'll show up as competition in the gig economy. And there will be slower adoption in the long-haul or commercial receivables market since someone will need to be responsible for the cargos.

In the end it will be forced, even if it's not a layoff. Fewer gig rides. Cheaper competition for hauling contracts as the driverless fleets grow and customers adapt. Forcing people to do more for less, or leave.

But where do those people go? The slow decline that forces people out by starving them out does not suit the situation well for retraining in a different career path.

The truckers will join all the tech support and customer service people queued up to interview for a smaller allotment of jobs. Then the programmers. Eventually even the business people who take up space following random business workflows that don't require an ounce of creativity will follow.

When automation starts to be really good, it will be the restaurant cooks. Servers will still be around, for dine-in restaurants, and personal services like massage therapists. But how long will it take for competition in the labor market to drive those wages down? Demand certainly won't be increasing since the pool of potential customers with disposable income will decrease.

The shrinking of the middle class that we've seen up until now is nothing compared to what we'll see in the next decade or two. This should not be handwaved away with an "Oh, those people? They'll just go do something else."

If we need to turn a 15-year long haul trucker into a solar power technician, what's the time frame and cost to do retrain, how does that trucker afford and avoid starvation while he does so?

Hopefully whatever minimally viable level of support we decide on as a society will be higher than "living in one of the growing tent cities while eating at the local soup kitchen". We're already struggling with those in the current labor market, which is a sign that the existing support system is insufficient. We're totally unprepared for the future labor market.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#494

Post by dragonwriter »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #310
ddalex wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we ban cars now we may still have a chance to save the horse industry

No, we won't need horse drivers either. But you might decide to build in enough additional taxes on the self-driving vehicles to cover at least the state's increased costs in terms of unemployment, medical, and services. This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.

> But you might decide to build in enough additional taxes on the self-driving vehicles to cover at least the state's increased costs in terms of unemployment, medical, and services.

A better idea would be to tax capital returns more rather than selectively adopting taxes individually on newer, more efficient but also capital (vs. labor) intensive industries.

Make one change and solve the problem globally rather than creating a new legislative fight over each automating industry.

> This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.

Reduced labor costs aren't a hidden cost (they are the opposite of a cost, in fact.)

If there is a hidden cost it is capitalist society hiding basic social support costs in payrolls, artificially inflating the cost of labor-intensive goods and services and subsidizing automation.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#495

Post by s1artibartfast »

likpok wrote: post #490
s1artibartfast wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More" is the critical word here. I don't see any reason why insurance premiums should increase. Insurance premiums aren't sin taxes or some governmental incentive, they are offered by private firms. I would expect premium levels to continue to be driven by liability pool payouts plus a profit margin. Autonomous vehicles don't increase driver risk or liability pool payouts. IF anything, they reduce them due to safer…

Insurance always balances between cost pooling and making people pay for their increased risk. Car insurance has always been more expensive for riskier drivers: young men pay more, driving “high risk” cars pay more. If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-on…

Yes, that is implicit in what I am saying. We have human only insurance pools today. I dont see a good reason why a human only insurance pool in the future would be more expensive than today.

Human driving wont be more risky than today.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#496

Post by guappa »

lucianbr wrote: post #237
guappa wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Catania area of course is one example.

> More recently, light snowfalls occurred on 9 February 2015, 6 January 2017 and 5 January 2019, but the last heavy snowfall dates back to 17 December 1988. Says wikipedia. Yeah, I don't know what I expected. Of course there's no actual snow in the meditteranean. It "lightly snowed" 3 times in the last 10 years.

I said the catania area, not the catania city centre. Learn to read perhaps?

This is in the catania area https://imgur.com/a/rhnIGNa

Perhaps you have no clue of what you're talking about?

I had snow 2 days ago… but sure, random guy on the internet who's never been here must educate me -_-' how completely unusual…

this is in calabria https://www.sullaneve.it/articoli/localita-italiane/calabria...

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#497

Post by disillusioned »

cma wrote: post #449
fragmede wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link is for Phoenix. They're not yet driving on the freeway in SF.

Thanks, didn't catch that, still driving on the freeway but maybe not in heavy rain yet.

They're _not_ driving on the freeway yet, outside of the limited test cases they outlined in the blog there, from this last January. Which is a bummer, because it adds _substantial_ travel time here in PHX, so, hopefully soon.
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