this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Thousands of accidents a year from human drivers. I sleep
90 accidents a year from autonomous vehicles. Lazer eyes
You make it sound like it's a 50/50 split between human drivers and autonomous vehicles, which is definitely not the case.
There are way more human drivers than autonomous vehicles. So, when an autonomous vehicle runs your child or pet over or whatever, who do you blame? The company? The programmers? The DMV for even allowing them on the road in the first place?
What's an autonomous vehicle do if it gets a flat? Park in the middle of the interstate like an idiot instead of pulling over and phone home for a mechanic?
You need to first ask yourself if it more important to put blame than to minimize risk.
"Autonomous vehicles could potentially reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90%."
"Autonomous vehicle accidents have been recorded at a slightly lower rate compared with conventional cars, at 4.7 accidents per million miles driven."
https://blog.gitnux.com/driverless-car-accident-statistics/
That opinion puts a lot of blind faith in the companies developing self driving and their infinitely altruistic motives.
That's one way of strawmanning your way out of a discussion.
It's not a strawman argument, it is a fact. Without the ability to audit the entire codebase of self-driving cars, there's no way to know if the manufacturer had knowingly hidden something in the code that might have caused accidents and fatalities too numerous to recount, but too important to ignore, that were linked to a fault in self-driving technology.
I was actually trying to find an article I'd read about Tesla's self-driving software reverting to manual control moments before impact, but I was literally flooded by fatality reports.
We can't audit the code for humans, but we still let them drive.
If the output for computers driving is less than for humans and the computer designers are forced to be as financially liable for car crashes as humans, why shouldn't we let computers drive?
I'm not fully in either camp in this debate, but fwiw, the humans we let drive generally suffer consequences if there is an accident due to their own negligence
Also we do audit them, it's called a license. I know it's super easy to get one in the US but in other countries they can be quite stringent.
Because there's no valid excuse to prevent us from auditing their software and it could save lives. Why the hell should we allow then to use the road if they won't even let us inspect the engine?
A car isn't a human. It's a machine, and it can and should be inspected. Anything less than that is pure recklessness.
Strawman arguments can be factual. The entire point is that you're responding to something that wasn't the argument. You're putting words in their mouth to defeat them instead of addressing their words at face value. It is the definition of a strawman argument.
It is most definitely a strawman to frame my comment as considering the companies "infinitely altruistic", no matter what lies behind the strawman. It doesn't refute my statistics but rather tries to make me look like I make an extremely silly argument I'm not making, which is the defintion of a strawman argument.
The data you cited comes straight from manufacturers, who've repeatedly been shown to lie and cherry-pick their data to intentionally mislead people about driverless car safety.
So no it's not a straw man argument at all to claim that you're putting inordinate faith in manufacturers, because that's exactly what you did. It's actually incredible to me how many of you are so irresponsible that you're not even willing to do basic cross-checking against an industry that is known for blatantly lying about safety issues.
It may be the case that every line of code of all self driving vehicles is not available for a public audit. But neither is the instruction set of every human who was taught to drive properly on the road today.
I would hope that through protesting and new legislation, that we will see the industry become more safe over time. Which we simply will never be able to achieve with human drivers.
What do you mean, I'm sure the industry whose standard practices include having the self-driving function turn itself off nanoseconds before a crash to avoid liability is totally motivated to spend the time and money it would take to fix the problem. After all, we live in a time of such advanced AI that all the news sites and magazines tell me we're on the verge of the Singularity, and they've never misled me before.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because no on seems to know or give a shit that Tesla was caught red handed doing this. They effectively murdered those drivers.
That wasn't an opinion, it's a statistic.
No (large public) company ever has altruistic motives. They aren't inherently good or bad, just machines driven by profit.
You don't need to put faith into companies beyond the faith that is put into humans. Make companies just as financially liable as humans are, and you'll still see a decrease in accidents.
You mean those companies who will lobby and spend a fraction of their wealth to make those lawsuits disappear?
So...
Your car is at fault. Their kid is dead.
Who pays for the funeral?
Does your insurance cover programming glitches?
If your insurance determined that an autonomous vehicle will cause less damage over time than a human driver, they will do that, yes.
I mean, why shouldn't it? Is a programming glitch in a self driving all that different from a mechanical issue in a manually driven car?
AI driven cars are just as prone to mechanical issues as well. Is AI smart enough to deal with a flat tire? Will it pull over to the side of the road before phoning in for a mechanic, or will it just ignorantly hard stop right in the middle of the interstate?
What's AI do when there's a police officer directing traffic around an accident or through a faulty red light intersection? I've literally seen videos on that before, AI couldn't give two shits about a cop's orders as to which way to drive the vehicle.
Using the public as Guinea pigs for corporate profits: priceless
DARPA figures out how to safely drive cars using LIDAR. Musk asked for a self driving car. Engineers come back the LIDAR solution. Musk fires them, says if humans can drive with two eyes, then so can computers. Cameras are cheaper than LIDAR. Second group tries it with cameras, can't get it to work, asked why they can't use LIDAR. Second group of engineers is fired. Third group comes up with something that 'kind of works'. People die. Big companies avoid self driving altogether, even though we have a perfect solution with LIDAR, all because Musk wanted to save a buck and can't get out of the way of his engineers.
I’ve worked on serious projects involving LiDAR. The LiDAR you need at these speeds and with this resolution cost almost as much as an Electric Car - it’s too expensive to reach wide adoption. But video processing with CNNs/RNNs has proven you can build the same level of data with cameras. You don’t even need binocular cameras now - if objects are moving you can generate binocular data by combining IMU data with time-series imagery.
As I understand it, Tesla’s delays aren’t related to image capture (which is where LiDAR could help). They’re related to trying to find universal actions to take against an almost infinite number of possible scenarios (mostly actions by human drivers).
When a for profit company is deciding how much time/energy/funds they want to invest in pedestrian safety, you get LOUD and you stay that way forever.
Your comment is blind to the reality we live in and the broken, out of touch people deciding if human lives are a businesses priority, and at what percentages, as these types of vehicles scale.
When humans get in an accident, there were choices/mistakes made, but there are things we can understand in certain situations and find closure often. When elon's failed experiment decapitates your grandmother by driving her under a semi and sheering off the top off the car, you'll probably never settle with that image as long as you live - and you'll see elon in the news each day being a tool and never seeing justice for that moment.
There's a difference with distinction in this conversation.
That's a really good point.
Imagine your dog gets run over, you rush them to the vet but ultimately they die and your thousands out of pocket. You call the corporate helpdesk to log a claim because there isn't anyone else to contact, they offer you $300 in credit for immediate resolution or you can dispute. You become upset because your dog was more than a credit refund, the call centre drone says that you've become aggressive, that you can call back during business hours and hangs up.
What a hell scape.
Oh ok I didn't realize a person's life was worth less of they're killed by the mistake of another person instead of the mistake of a computer. Since it'll be easier for their loved ones to blame a person and just get over it then that's better. Thanks for explaining that!
the real funny here is how the USA has the most lax driving test standards in the developed world resulting in crazy amounts of road traffic accidents and really high mortality rates, but instead of dealing with shitty driving at the source there's a billion dollar industry in autonomous driving.
Exploitation is the American way, bro. Create problems where there are none, offer a solution, profit.
Did you read the article? The protests are in favour of affordable public transit, instead of using 'surveillance pods' as a way to build even MORE roads. The accidents are probably the least of their concerns, although still on the list
They stop for no reason, cause gridlocks that require a human to comd out to it and pilot it, they've run over fire hoses being used and don't always get out of the way for emergency service vehicles. Nice statistic though.
So are you talking about autonomous cars or...
If sarcasm could make the cars drive better I'd send you right out, but maybe you should leave the issue to people who at least understand the actual problem.
But are you the people who at least understand the actual problem?
Im literally telling you what they say in the articles about why they're doing this and all you guys wanna do is joke and pretend theres no issues with an unproved technology because you saw some statistics about it. So compared to the other commenters in this chain Im Secretary Butigege.
Articles are not as factual as you seem to be making out. Every stupid thing you've mentioned has been done by humans 100 times over. The difference is we can fix the issue in self driving vehicles while humans will continue to make the mistakes.
You're never gonna fix them by denying they have problems, welcome, that's how we got to this conversation.
Sir/Mam/Potato, you got my upvotes 👍
I mean, there's probably millions of drivers performing more driving and less than that of autonomous vehicles.
I personally can't wait for autonomous vehicles to take over but the argument would be clearer with percentages and stuff.
90 accidents a year is a LOT, if you stop to think that there are like only a few dozens of them out there, versus more than a hundred million human drivers.
Comparing these two requires the number of cars with human drivers and the amount of time humans spend driving per year versus the number of autonomous vehicles and the amount of time they spend driving per year. I am not saying that you are wrong, I am just saying that comparing these numbers directly is like comparing apples with oranges.