Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals
ideas.4brad.com

I had a conversation about this with friends in Germany a few months back.

In most societies, a mistake that causes suffering to another individual is usually 'blamed' on the person causing the suffering. In many cases where causality is obvious, this assignment of blame is fairly straightforward. Example: Bob fell asleep, which caused him to lose control of his car, which hit the bus, which killed a child. Bob is now culpable for the child's family suffering. Bob remains one of many others who share culpability at this point, assuming others are also falling asleep at the wheel. FWIW, 103M people fell asleep at the wheel last year in the US, so Bob will likely have company.

Now put an autonomous piece of software written by company X into Bob's car. Bob engages the autopilot, falls asleep, the autopilot software experiences an error, the software fails to alert Bob, the software loses control of the car, which hits a bus, which kills a child. Who is culpable for the family's suffering now? The software? Company X?

The only way for company X to both a) allow Bob to fall asleep and b) bear the culpability for a family's suffering is to get the software to the point it only makes mistakes in a timeframe that is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude greater than Bob making the same mistake.

The logic goes that, once a company's software kills a child, it's going to be pretty hard to keep the public from reacting negatively, even though overall suffering will decrease. The only option company X is to require Bob to accept he is "driving" the car and bear the culpability of any suffering the car's software may cause, or alternately, be ready to pay a substantial settlement that offsets suffering.

Guess what... Apple didn't sell the first smartphone either.

Someone takes a small step into car driving automation, tries to create some buzz around it, then I've got to read about how it's not a big deal. The nuances between autonomous and auto-pilot need to be discussed. We need a taxonomy.

I guess writing these sorts of articles is a million times easier than adding any autonomous features to any vehicle.

Forward progress is extremely important. It comes technically and socially. Let's hope everyone demands a car with "that stuff" they have in a Tesla. We'll get a little arms race that'll pay for further development, lives will be save (in total), and we'll asymptotically approach the vision.

This assertion isn't obvious to me. In my experience incremental updates are often exponential in their impact (especially if enough resources are put into a problem). Moore's Law is an excellent example of this: at any given time, researchers are working on a fixed number of solutions that will generally make a fixed % impact. This is why we can see a doubling in transistor density without a huge increase in the size of the industry.

In the case of reducing accidents, I could see a similar exponential pattern. The first incremental step maybe took the accident rate from 10% to 1% by eliminating 90% of the possible sources of accidents. In the second step, researchers will again shoot to eliminate 90% of the current causes of accidents, bringing the rate to 0.1%. This could repeat every couple years until the accident rate is sufficiently close to 0.